Kate Weston: An ode to Selling Sunset

Dear Selling Sunset,

I love you. I love your outfits, your savage drama, and your elaborate dog funerals. I love that you can take me from my moth infested 2-bed conversion flat in east London, into the glass houses of Beverley Hills and I love that I can stare at a $5million price tag on the screen and exclaim “it’s so cheap!” But most of all, I love that you aren’t just about selling property. You’re about so much more.

I’d like, if I may, to admire Selling Sunset for all that it is. You see before you, your creator Adam Divello devised Laguna Beach, a show I discovered aged nineteen while recovering from surgery. I was no stranger to reality TV – I’d just watched H from Steps’ H-Side Story. But Laguna Beach was something else, it gave me access to the real lives of Orange County’s most elite teenagers. I and approximately 2 million viewers had front row seats to their love triangles, spring break trips, and sun-drenched dramas. Laguna Beach then became The Hills, when main character Lauren (sorry Kristen) moved to LA and I would tune in to her glamorous pool and beachside life from my student flat. But when that ended somewhat iconically in 2010, I left the LA scene behind.

These shows though, were the gateway drug that primed me to fall swiftly into your elaborately dressed arms the moment you aired in 2019. You felt like the adult Laguna Beach. Bickering, complex relationships, massive houses. You were The Hills with added square footage, and you had me at “she can sit on the floor until she proves herself,” – Christine, 61 seconds into S1, E1 about office newbie, Chrishell.

To me, Selling Sunset, you are beautiful, and you’re not just about selling property. You depict complex office relationships and dynamics. You enable me to tour the houses of the uber rich, gathering scientific evidence that proves money doesn’t buy taste. You gifted us some of the most iconic and savage lines on TV, e.g: Christine calling Chrishell “a b*tch who must own a sunglasses hut because she’s so f*cking shady.” You gifted us Christine’s ‘casual’ “sexual phantom of the opera” engagement party with added zebras. And you gifted us fashion; Christine’s bag shaped like a chair, the skort that broke Reddit, and Chelsea’s tiny Deisel skirt/belt, an item of clothing so rigid it could break anything. It’s doubtless studier than some of my roof tiles.

I love you so much, that I wrote a book inspired by you, a kind of Selling Sunset, with murders set in the UK. It’s a thriller, but like you, it’s also about the complex relationships between women in the office. Things can get pretty savage, and with everyone competing for listings and status, it’s an estate-agent-eat-estate-agent world. And if they want to get to the top then, as Christine would say (while quoting Britney Spears), “you better work b*tch.”

Anyway, I love you,

Kate Weston

How To Make A Killing is published by Headline on 3 July 2025