Million Dollar Beach House is TV's bleakest show

The Cut

"If watching Selling Sunset feels like resting your brain in a nice, cool infinity pool overlooking Los Angeles, watching Million Dollar Beach House feels like dropping your brain into a recently divorced financial adviser’s expensive new hot tub: an experience that’s ostensibly picturesque but also uncomfortable and deeply sad," says Madeleine Aggeler of Netflix' newest luxury real estate reality show. "The fact that it’s male-centric isn’t the problem. A good broker bro can make for great television. Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles and Million Dollar Listing New York are full of immaculately groomed real-estate guys who love expensive suits and gleefully yell at people on their cell phones while getting chauffeured around. They have short tempers and sharp tongues and clearly delight in starting drama wherever they go. So far, though, none of the Beach House cast seem to have the TV savvy of, say, Million Dollar Listing New York’s Ryan Serhant or Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles’s Josh Flagg, who once slapped his colleague, Josh Altman, for talking about his grandmother. Even when there are staged, dramatic confrontations in Million Dollar Beach House, they feel flat."