If you’re a Selling Sunset, Selling The O.C., or Selling Tampa fan or one of the 280,000 members of the r/SellingSunset subreddit, you might want to know about a new Netflix show called Buying London. It feels very similar to the franchise, centred around a group of high-flying, super glam, luxury property agents taking you through a major city’s most expensive homes and selling them to vaguely interested people with dragon hordes of cash.
In Netflix’s Buying London, DDRE Global property mogul Daniel Daggers (who quite genuinely refers to himself as “Mr Super Prime”) and his team of beautiful agents and marketing creatives Reme Nicole, Rasa Bagdonaviciute, Lauren Christy, Rosi Walden, Oli Hamilton, Juliana Ardenius, and Olivia Wayne open up doors in fancypants neighbourhoods like Holland Park, St John’s Wood, and Mayfair, and generally either flirt or yell at each other over dinner in some of London’s top restaurants.
And reader, the show is getting absolutely slammed.
The Guardian‘s Rebecca Nicholson led the charge against the show with one hell of a zero-star review and a headline calling it “probably the most hateable TV show ever made”.
“I hate almost everything about Buying London,” Nicholson wrote in her tremendously scathing piece (it’s such a good read, honestly). “I hate that it bases all of its dramatic tension on pitting women against each other. I hate that it makes Richard Curtis’s film Notting Hill look like a gritty documentary about the mean streets of London. I hate its England-for-dummies shtick that is clearly pitched at an international market. I hate its reverence for billionaires and bad taste, its celebrity name-dropping without actual celebrities, even the lurching drone footage that seems to have been shot by the Red Arrows.”
In a move that could have gone either way, Netflix ran with it. Guardian‘s very headline was picked up by Netflix’s UK and Ireland team and brandished onto social media ads, with five empty stars.
But there’s more than a few reactions from viewers of the show, calling out the fact that very little property seems to be sold in the first three episodes (they’re right) and the general cringe of it all.
But there’s still some who love the drama.
My own opinion? Look, I love the drama too, and I’m well aware this isn’t the first reality TV to showcase extreme wealth (they all pretty much do). London is one of the most expensive cities in the world with a property market, wealth disparity, and class-based inequality to match — in Buying London, an agent literally makes the talking head remark, “Us poshos stick together, you know?” But it’s a pretty awkward time for a show about luxury real estate in England to drop, with poverty increasing in the UK — in 2022 and 2023, 18 percent of people in the UK were in absolute poverty and 21 percent were in relative poverty after housing costs, and 11 percent of people lived in food insecure households, including 17 percent of children.
But hey, they’re nice houses on the show though.
See what you make of it. Buying London is now streaming on Netflix.
