Buying London
Yes, that’s right: I may be a future PhD candidate, a frequent theatre-goer, and I love a well-curated museum (Forget Tate Britain: Its re-mount just doesn’t track dramaturgically.). But behind every girly freshening up on her Foucault or revising the rhetoric of that infamous (hey, maybe in my mind ;)) Auslander/Phelan debate on Liveness is a girl who loves pure, kitschy, and ultra-b***hy reality TV.
For those of us who watch it, we all know that it’s no fun without the discourse that comes after. If a tree falls in the forest and no one was there to see it, then did it really fall? If Ekin-Su crawled her way to the terrace to kiss Jay on last night’s episode of Love Island, but my work bestie hasn’t caught up and, therefore, I have no one to discuss the matter with, then did it really happen?! I remember when I first saw The Guardian’s review of Usher’s Superbowl Halftime Performance, and I felt seen. Just that morning, I was screaming at my phone: WHY DID HE FARM OUT 90% OF THAT PERFORMANCE? I was thinking about the show that entire day and my utter disappointment in Usher: He is worth so much more. As always, The Guardian chose to be contrarian, awarding the show a lofty 4 stars. I very much disagree, but that’s for an entirely different post (or an evidenced-based ranking of the best Superbowl Halftime Performances of all time).
This time, with Buying London, The Guardian has absolutely nailed it. To my recollection, I’m not sure I’ve seen even this publication give anything zero stars. But that’s not why I’m obsessed with it. Reality TV is pure escapism— and not only for myself. We watch it to forget about the madness and complication of our daily lives. In my case, I watch it as a welcome reminder that I actually have a healthier psychological mindset than most. But Buying London is an unwelcome reminder that this country is gaslighting me.
You know those Facebook clickbait videos that give you ‘Five DIY Fashion Fixes’ or ‘10 Craft Ideas for Your Home’ and they are all insanely terrible? And all of the comments agree? The real estate on Buying London is precisely that. It will show you a country house pummeled with light oak-y wood in a town in Hertfordshire that you have never even heard of. But it’s full of ‘character’. And it’s in a ‘gated community’. And it has so much ‘English charm’. And it’s 15,000 square feet. That is 5x the biggest house I have ever lived in, and I’m not just American; I’m Texan. Before we even get to that, the price tag is 15 million quid. You still couldn’t pay me to live in it.
Beyond that, as Rebecca Nicholson so rightly puts it in her review, this country is bitterly impoverished. And we’re still in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Since moving here three years ago, my standard Tube fare has risen by 40p a ride, and my rent has risen by 13%. I make not even 37,000 GBP per year, and that is not likely to change much, even within the next 10 years. Prices in the UK rise as fast as they do in the US, but wages here are so pitifully low that the salary I just cited above is above average. So excuse me if steam pushes out of my ears and I want to punch the laptop because Daniel Daggers is showing me this is what I could get if I only work hard enough to be retroactively born into landed gentry so that I can afford an ugly, unpolished, overly expensive house in the middle of Hertfordshire.
I say all this, of course, as an American. And I fully own that I can go back to the ‘land of opportunity’ I came from if I don’t like it. But in all this, I’m trying to understand the audience for Buying London and what precisely the show is trying to do to its audience. Reviewers are billing the series as Selling Sunset for across the pond. I admit I discovered Daggers through the wholesome L’Agence, also a Netflix original. But that’s a far cry, in my opinion from the audiences that would enjoy the Selling Sunset franchise, and this series would certainly come across as a little less tone deaf and a bit more real if it actually thought about the people who live in the UK for .25 seconds. It’s somewhat of a mystery to me that a show about a very English, very estate agent-y estate agent would take the route of the Selling Sunsets, the Buying Beverly Hills, and honestly? Maybe it’s even cosying up to The Real Housewives level. As my partner so rightly pointed out (when he definitely wasn’t watching it; he just overheard it): the show doesn’t work because a Brit would never say ‘I feel…’ When Daggers tells Lauren, ‘I feel hurt by that’, it doesn’t ring true because an Englishman would rarely publicly display their true emotions, let alone say them. Likewise, Rasa’s outburst over being disinvited to a company trip to Dubai seems ingenuine and over the top, with fans on Netflix’s socials likening it to a bad GCSE drama performance. Everyone is pushing for emotions to give the American audiences what they want.
And if an American audience is what they’re after, we won’t be easily fooled. Are our houses obscenely huge? Sure. Do we have more McMansions than there are people to put them in? Absolutely. But I’d take a $1.25 million McMansion over that ‘manor’ in Radlett any day. It’s a bit more tasteful.
I watched the entire first season of Buying London in one night, and I was shouting at the screen the whole time. You can find Rebecca Nicholson’s justly #savage zero star review here.
