As fun as it was, Mountainhead seems to have broken something in quite a lot of people. For some, it was simply too timely. After all, it’s one thing to release a film about tech billionaires fighting over the remnants of a world ravaged by war and AI, but quite another to do it while that exact thing was really happening.
For others, Mountainhead marked the point where ultra-rich antiheroes reached full saturation. Writing in the AV Club last week, Saloni Gajjar made the argument that – between Mountainhead, Your Friends & Neighbors, The White Lotus and Nine Perfect Strangers – we have now arrived at a moment where television seems unable to tell stories that are about anything but the badly behaved rich.
Gajjar’s point is well made, but I think the truth might be a little bit more insidious than that. Yes, we do appear to be in the middle of an unceasing wealth glut on television, but the problem isn’t just rich antiheroes. It’s the rich, full stop.
If you watch enough TV, you might have noticed a slow creep of aspiration. Houses are getting bigger. Clothes are becoming more stylish. Home furnishings have become so universally luxe that no matter what I’m watching – Shrinking, maybe, or The Four Seasons – I’ll almost always find myself detaching from the plot to wonder where the characters bought their nice lamps.
And once you start to notice it, you’ll see it everywhere. The Better Sister is a generic murder mystery that is impossible to engage with because everyone lives their lives in a heightened state of monied comfort. Sirens is a whirlwind of impeccable interiors and not much else.
Nobody on And Just Like That has spent even a second worrying about money, even though Carrie Bradshaw has basically got the exact same job as me and I can barely make it halfway around Lidl without having a panic attack about exceeding my overdraft. When I watched Good American Family, my first thought wasn’t ‘How awful that these people abandoned their infant daughter alone in an apartment while they moved to Canada,’ but ‘How the hell did these people afford an entire separate apartment for their infant daughter?’
And this is the problem. At least when the rich people are the baddies you can argue that the shows are attempting to make a point about them. Succession essentially trapped its characters within the confines of their wealth. They might have it all, the show said, but only because they had to cash in their souls. And while The White Lotus has to return to the same well too many times by dint of its format, it still has plenty to say about the wealthy. This year, especially, it was the newly wealthy. Watch how quickly Belinda, a lowly spa manager in season one, traded in all of her defining traits the moment a windfall hit her account.
I’d even argue that Mountainhead didn’t qualify as wealth porn, because every single character was caught up in a frantic, exhausting status game to the exclusion of everything else in their lives. True, it featured a massive house but, as Variety’s recent group interview revealed, they only chose it because it made the cinematographer want to kill himself. I’m no expert, but I don’t think that the appeal of porn is how many suicidal tendencies it triggers.
In other words, depictions of extreme wealth on TV are OK if they have a point. All these shows had a point. Billions had a point. Even Schitt’s Creek managed to say something about money. The problem is when this wears away and characters are only rich because producers want to give the viewer something nice to look at. Sometimes this shift even happens on the same series. The Morning Show might have started as a glossy satire about Reese Witherspoon’s plucky reporter being thrust into the well-to-do world of New York media, but it lost that bite long ago. Now it exists as a weird kind of internal competition to see which character can have the shiniest hair.
And it’s this Selling Sunset-ification of television that needs to stop. When we’re confronted with such an unyielding parade of upscale comfort, the effect isn’t as aspirational as producers probably think. We aren’t left with a growling envy of how the other half lives; we’re instead left worrying that they wouldn’t know what real life was like if you bonked them over the head with a Poundland flipflop. Although if anyone from The Four Seasons does want to get in touch to tell me where all their nice lamps came from (and, where possible, some acceptable Temu dupes) I’d appreciate it.