Hi everyone and welcome to the first Reality Recap! I’m Jeffrey Dratch, and like many of you, I love all things reality TV (arguably the best genre of television), so I thought that Reality Recap could allow me to share what I’m thinking about with the rest of The Harbinger community.

For each review, I will choose the latest season of some of my favorite reality TV shows, and give each show an overall grade, in addition to answering three key questions about the new season.

1. Best/worst moment in the season

What part of the season did I truly enjoy the most, and was happiest with the state of everything going on? What part of the season was simply hard to watch, and made me cringe the entire time?

2. Standout cast member

Who was, subjectively of course, the best cast member throughout the whole season, who carried the show in a way?

3. Most dramatic

Which cast member radiated a lot of negativity towards others, and might have made the show hard to watch at times?

4. Overall grade

What are my overall impressions and views on the show?

So without further ado, let’s get started on my first review, one of my all time favorites: Selling Sunset, season five. 

If you’ve ever watched Selling Sunset, you probably know the basic storyline of the show, but if you haven’t, allow me to give you a basic understanding. Jason and Brett Oppenheim are owners of The Oppenheim Group real estate brokerage, with many agents working under them, they sell multi million dollar properties throughout the city. The show not only encompasses the agents selling these properties, but also all of the drama between them that goes on.

Best moment in the season

Season five is certainly the most polarizing, dramatic season of Selling Sunset yet. So many elements made for a season that kept me watching episode after episode, almost all in one sitting. While each episode was filled with negativity and drama, there were certainly scenes that I really enjoyed watching, despite the drama. The best moment in season five is hands down in episode 10, when newcomer Emma Herman reveals to office manager Mary Fitzgerald how Christine Quinn, often the center of drama, offered Herman’s client five thousand dollars to not work with Herman, and work with Quinn instead. This scene revealed so much about Quinn’s character, and that she is often an extremely disrespectful, unethical agent. After being revealed in the reunion episode, the brokers ended up actually terminating Quinn as a result of this incident.

Worst moment in the season

I, like so many other viewers of Selling Sunset, was all-in on the relationship between Jason Oppenheim and agent and Dancing with the Stars alum Chrishell Stause. Dating publicly for five months, viewers and other agents were rooting for this couple, thinking that they were the perfect match, and would most likely get engaged. However, Stause’s biggest criteria for her significant other is willingness to have kids, and Oppenheim didn’t want to have children. After much time and deliberation, the couple broke up at the end of the season. This was really sad to watch for many viewers, including myself, and it was painful to see how much this split hurt Oppenheim’s emotional well-being during the reunion.

Standout cast member

Season five, at least for me, was very different from all of the other seasons of Selling Sunset, in that I had really different perceptions of everyone in the show. There were some people that I would have never expected to have enjoyed watching, but I ended up really enjoying them. My favorite cast member in season five was definitely agent Heather Rae El Moussa. Viewers saw a lot more of El Moussa’s personality and feelings this season compared to others. I loved seeing her entire marriage process to her now husband throughout the season, and how some of the other people in the show, especially Christine Quinn, affected her.

Most Dramatic

Every reality show isn’t complete without a fair amount of drama, and season five of Selling Sunset is certainly no exception. There is one particular cast member in Selling Sunset that I think we can all agree, whether you like her or not, was essentially the center of all of the drama. Of course, the most dramatic person in Selling Sunset was Christine Quinn. She not only involved herself in so many areas that she didn’t have a place to, but she also literally brought some agents, such as Heather, to tears.

Overall Grade: A-

Season five was probably the best season yet, and extremely entertaining to watch. However, the amount of negativity was fairly significant, and I honestly think that there might have been more drama in season five than all of the other seasons combined. I believe that the original concept of Selling Sunset, showing the lives of top level real estate agents in Los Angeles, was lost in translation. In the first season, so much more about the real estate market was documented, but that isn’t the case anymore. If you want to see what it is truly like to be a Los Angeles real estate agent, you should watch Million Dollar Listing: Los Angeles, on Bravo, as it has always been much more transparent and is one of my all-time favorites. 

I’m sure many of you were just as glued to your seats as I was watching this, and I look forward to the next Reality Recap!