Selling Sunset Recap: We Know Who the Bad Person Is

Stop all the sales, cut off the IG Lives, prevent the dogs from barking with some McDonald’s fries, silence the iPhones and accept the cal invite, sprinkle out the ashes and let the mourners fight. — W H Auden (and me)

It takes a lot to promise me a fight at a dog funeral and somehow disappoint, but Selling Sunset pulled it off. In episodes eight and nine, “Down on Your Potluck” and “Two Listings and a Funeral,” Mary and Jason suffer the loss of their dog Niko, a very good boy who lived 18 very good years with people who loved him so much. Their raw grief — visible even through their incredible amounts of botox — is so gut-wrenching it makes even Brett and Jason seem like relatable human beings.

But at least Alanna finally found some trees, right!? I was starting to worry. Our plucky gal has found a new project manager: a man in a vest with a button-up shirt! As we all know, if you have a weirdly complicated and specific need — like opening an IRA or filling up seats at a bar and grill near an office park — a man in a vest with a button-up shirt can probably help. This particular man is also British, which means he says “privacy” in a silly way, which is also a treat. Brett is so proud of her, they blow right past it when she arrives empty-handed to the Niko memorial potluck.

The potluck got close to being fun, but it was mostly a reminder that many of these people are deeply broken and live in a sick world. The whole affair is clearly some sort of veiled competition to see who does the best presentation, with Chrishell trying to win the “most folksy and charming” award by pouring mac and cheese from a take-out container into a serving dish in the back seat of the car she just arrived in, with the door open. Now, if someone walked into my home from outside with mac and cheese in an uncovered serving dish, I would simply throw it away because that is disgusting. Food is either outside or inside; you can’t have outside food coming inside to be eaten unless it has been properly protected from having been outside. The one exception, of course, is food made on a grill, but that’s different because the food is being made outside. Mac and cheese is made inside, which means it needs to stay inside (or inside a container) until it reaches its final destination. This is just an obvious social norm.

Meanwhile, you can almost hear the record scratch in Emma’s head when she realizes Mary has brought empanadas, the dish Emma is literally famous for selling in its frozen vegan form. This is just enough juice to give us a classic Emma stunt where she puts Mary’s empanadas on the balcony and even throws one off of it. Mary doesn’t seem to mind because Mary has never had a conflict she couldn’t avoid completely, and also because maybe her dog dying has made her too sad to care. But boy have I missed this version of Emma!

Bre ostensibly “wins” the potluck by hiring a private chef to come cook for everyone, which is so annoying. First, I am so sure she did not actually pay this man to come and open a can of caviar for them. This is a chef who spent 30 minutes tops throwing together some tacos with mini tequila bottles in exchange for being on TV. Secondly, showing up to what is ostensibly a warm family potluck in a home with a random stranger in tow that everyone now has to interact with is weird and irritating! Bre is testing me, and the confrontation at Niko’s funeral doesn’t give us any progress.

Emma decides that the reception after Niko’s funeral at Mary’s house is the perfect time to talk to Bre about … something. At this point, it’s hard to parse what anyone wants out of all this. Emma seems to want to know if Bre is the kind of person who would engage in the practice of creating storylines for a reality TV show at the expense of someone else’s marriage, and Bre is Bre. She’s insecure and super defensive about everything, simultaneously blaming the producers (who I assume she’s referencing when she talks about “the power to set up a scene”) and her friend Amanda Lynn.

Chelsea, to her credit, is extremely over this. She obviously has much bigger problems and, at this point, admits she doesn’t even care if Bre did do this intentionally. She’s also never particularly liked Bre, so this is all about Emma and Chrishell trying to avoid having to pick sides. “I’m just here for moral support,” Chrishell says at one point, without even clarifying whom she’s morally supporting. It’s especially weird because Bre is so dismissive of the value of their friendship that it doesn’t really feel like it matters if they can’t be friends with her. I realize Bre’s tough exterior probably hides a deeply wounded and soft inner being, but we never see any evidence of that, and she clearly doesn’t want us to see it, so who cares?

The only even slightly interesting thing we get out of this is Bre’s reveal that she told Emma and Chrishell she was filming with Amanda Lynn ahead of time, which could mean anything. Or nothing. It’s a little embarrassing for Chelsea, who had just spent several minutes reminding Chrishell and Emma that they are her best friends, but it doesn’t mean they knew how devastating Amanda Lynn’s intel would be for Chelsea. Bre’s defense, which she keeps repeating, is that if she’d wanted to hurt Chelsea with this information, she would have revealed it in a far more cruel fashion. I don’t think that tracks with what we already know. Bre is smarter than, for example, Nicole. She understands how people see her. She knew enough to know it didn’t look good that she’d brought it to camera in the first place, so she clearly understood that the only way to get this on TV without getting a full villain edit was to do exactly what she did. Her hat looked great though.

Unlisted Observations

• Z-Listers Who Pretended to Almost Buy (or Sell) a House:

I didn’t want to know who Joey Essex was, but now that I do I can’t stop thinking about his teeth — are they making some kind of statement about British stereotypes? Does he use Listerine before every sentence to maintain their blueish cast? Do they glow in the dark? Help!

The D’Amelio Family wants The O Group to sell the massive house they acquired from the money they made creating content for the CCP TikTok. They also claim they want to have a farm at their next house, which I assume is not because they want to engage in the extremely hard, no-vacations-no-sick-days life of an actual farmer and simply want to have a bunch of silly animals to use in videos. Content never sleeps.

• Chelsea can break dance and cook a hearty lasagne. Jeff, you are an idiot beyond measure.

• “There are no rules,” Jason on the protocol for dog funerals.

• Can the neighbors of that Carmen Crest house that Chelsea shows Joey Essex sue for how it’s being marketed as an after-party house? I’d be furious if a bunch of realtors were telling the world’s worst men that they could blast their crappy music just yards from my bedroom window all night to try and impress women.

• I realize I’m probably getting roasted in the comments for my defense of Nicole (Editor’s note: she is). And that’s fair! You can boo me! But I want you to do me one favor and try to imagine how much more fun that funeral would’ve been if Nicole had put down the literal popcorn she’s shown eating at the window and joined the fray. Now that’s a show.