Here are some extracts from the soundtrack of the Netflix series Buying Beverly Hills, songs that all sound vaguely like, but aren’t actually, popular songs from the charts.
Some are obsessed with productivity: “More money, more money, more money,” gurgles one materialistic crooner. “Everything I do, I do like a boss!” insists another. “Get busy and let’s get to work!”
These singers are generally only thrilled with themselves. “This is my time!” yells one chanteuse. “This is my time coming!” they continue to yell, in case we missed it. “We are ... we are ... the new generation!” burbles another. “We are ... we are ... a brilliant sensation!”
Some are melodically gluttonous: “Go on and have the whole damn cake,” groans an anonymous singer who sounds like they’ve eaten a whole damn cake. “Haters hate, but I can’t relate,” they add, possibly unable to muster up the energy to hate because their cholesterol is through the roof.
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And some just want your feedback: “Are you feeling this? Say ‘yeah!’” they request. (“Yeah,” I say). “Are you feeling this? Say ‘What?’” they demand. (I don’t respond this time because I’ve stopped feeling “this”.)
The soundtrack of Buying Beverly Hills traffics in the aspirational pop music of acquisitive sociopaths. I suspect these songs were devised by a Netflix employee in a hazmat suit feeding third-hand descriptions of Destiny’s Child songs, synthesiser presets, pages of Atlas Shrugged, and cocaine into the Netflix algorithm with a filthy tin funnel.
Look, I’m not saying my mopey generation was better off. Our party bangers had titles like Loser or Creep or Freakscene or Shit Sandwich (My Life Is a) or Sad Man Cry Party (Millennium Remix) or I Think with Our Combined Salaries We Can Live in Drogheda, Mairead. (I wrote the last three myself.)
But it’s just possible that we have overcorrected for past mistakes and that the upcoming generation has too much self-esteem. So be it. Things will balance out when they see what our lot has done to the planet and the economy. Or, to put it another way, “Are you feeling this? Say ‘What?’”
And speaking of what we’ve done to the planet and economy, these songs typically play over montages of the sun-scorched Los Angeles hills where the American rich stockpile their ill-gotten resources, and a hunk who hates “drama” says something sassy.
The general pitch of Buying Beverly Hills: a silver-haired real-estate Svengali named Mauricio Umansky owns a stable of housemongering hunks who cater to his land-hungry whims. If this sounds familiar it’s because Mauricio is doing for the word “buying” what those teeny-weeny Oppenheim twins have done for “selling”. For in the similarly alliterative Selling Sunset, the Oppenheims also have a coterie of hot-headed, home-flipping hotties.
But there is one crucial difference. Mauricio must also choose who among his daughters will inherit his methane-producing hunk herd. And so each must vie for his love from episode to episode. It’s basically Selling Sunset meets King Lear. Although I presume Mauricio hasn’t read King Lear or he wouldn’t have chosen to tempt fate by hiring so many fools. It’s just a matter of episodes before he’s found wandering the heath with a hunk in a jester’s cap.
In the short term he expounds, Lear-like, upon his business philosophy. “The number one rule: no assholes,” he says, speaking figuratively, not literally, because literally we need our assholes to live. (I checked with the Health Editor.)
He also says “The agency truly is a family” even though only two of his employees are literally family and they clearly get preferential treatment while the unaffiliated hunks give them the old stink eye.
My favourite character is Alexia (Goneril), the daughter who is terrible at being a real-estate agent and so is probably going to inherit everything. In one episode she fills a house she is selling with kittens and puppies that I assume now infest the walls. At one point Mauricio just hands her a valuable and much coveted property to sell in front of her astounded, more competent sister, Farrah (Cordelia). “I love you, Daddy!” says Alexia in response, which is, also, by coincidence, what I say to my editor when I get assignments.
Farrah expresses some reservations about Alexia’s ability to do the job and Mauricio responds with a complicated sports metaphor. “If the father can’t give [his child] the best chance to be a quarterback, I don’t know how you get a chance,” he says, clearly under the illusion that professional quarterbacks are normally the children of the coach. Look, I don’t know anything about sports. Maybe this is true.
But I can see why he’s bolstering his own family. He’s surrounded by scheming hunks of all stripes. They generally resemble nefarious Bratz dolls. One man’s eyebrows are defined enough to have their own passport, social-security number and spin-off show. The hunks have no HR department, so they’re all in messy relationships with each other.
And they have hunk customs. When greeting, the women throw their arms out widely and dramatically, like a goalie, and then clasp the other while air-kissing the empty air nearby. They sure love that empty air. When the male hunks meet, they high-five each other before doing that combination hug-and-back-pat thing heterosexual American men do to ensure they don’t accidentally have sex. (If they don’t do the back pat, they will accidentally have sex.)
The hunks love telling the camera things that they’re trying to hide from their colleagues. “I have feelings for Alexia,” a callow young hunk named Joey says to the camera moments after trying to convince Alexia he has no feelings for her. Luckily, I don’t think Alexia knows they’re making a television show.
All of the hunks have jobs to do, but they seem to prefer quaffing champagne and gobbling hors d’oeuvres while gazing out on the cursed LA landscape and telling each other in detail about a conversation that we’ve all just witnessed in its entirety moments ago. “Farrah told me that you told Alexia what I told you,” is a sentence a woman called Melissa says to a woman called Sonika. We know this already, for we just watched Farrah tell Melissa that Sonika told Alexia what Melissa told Sonika. And now I’m telling you – and I want you to tell someone else while I film you. But only if that’s your thing.
If the popularity of shows like this has taught me anything it’s that that’s a kink a lot of people have. Ah, what am I complaining about? Sure this is just the excellent foppery of the world.
