The 150th anniversary of Million Dollar Beach House
Netflix subscribers around the globe must agree that we’ve hit the apex of reality television. Since 1870, when the first wealthy New Yorkers came to ‘take the air’ in the provincial hamlets of The Hamptons, there have been 150 annual seasons of Million Dollar Beach House, each one more refreshingly, crisply ‘real’ than the last.
And this latest season delivers. The unfathomable depths of American society are revealed from beneath a Greggio’s silver-plated cloche of truth. Truths such as “at 28, JB thinks he might finally be ready to Become A Man” and “for the 9th time this episode, Michael’s character arc requires him to remind you that he is having a baby.”
As we’ve seen over more than a century of relentlessly enlightening content, the air is not the only thing the well-heeled bros of history took on their arrival to The Hamptons. Readers will remember the infamous Season 12 (1882), which saw the colonial residents of Southampton’s farming and whaling communities seeking legal action to prevent wealthy summer-house developers from segmenting off portions of public beach for newly-private lots. The communities who live and work in The Hamptons all year round lost that battle, but it was nothing compared to the battle waged in Season 13, which followed the protracted investigation into who of the farmers had been talking shit behind Jebediah’s back ever since.
Season 68 (1938) got real, again — as does every season, you understand — this time with a hurricane so powerful, it made lasting changes to the shape of Long Island’s shoreline. It caused the deaths of 600 people, and a total of $6.2 million worth of damage. (Today, that would be roughly $114 million, so perhaps 2 or 3 houses listed by Noel.) As if this wasn’t dramatic enough, Season 68 also housed an episode in which a multi-millionaire made it very clear how little they liked a vase.
And now, in Season 150, we are faced with the utter, unflinching reality of what it means to be a citizen of the United States. 2020’s season had so many ups, downs, and potential angles for mining drahmaaaaah, that hordes of scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. The early flight of Manhattanites to their summer mansions to avoid the pandemic was filmed over March, but had to be cut to accommodate enough uses of the phrase ‘indoor-outdoor living’. A segment on the number of year-round Hamptons residents that use food pantries in winter was also cut, because the music supervisor couldn’t find an EDM track that suited the tone.
An entire episode’s worth of footage was filmed in July, in which young New Yorkers and members of the Shinnecock Nation protested outside the Southampton mansion of Mike Bloomberg. They were demanding greater taxation of the country’s wealthiest residents to help combat the economic devastation of the coronavirus, after Governor Cuomo’s statement that 20% would be cut from state funding for schools, hospitals and housing agencies.
That was shelved to make way for Michael’s discussion with JB concerning the current dilation of his wife’s cervix (two centimeters) while he was filmed sitting on the oceanfront, lamenting that he has no cell service in case she needs to call him. “Look at this!” he blurts, “we own the world, man.” Yes, this season, by all accounts, has been too real.