‘Selling Sunset’ docu-soap has it all
Divorce by text.
If there is one takeaway to be had from the most recent season of “Selling Sunset” — the dreamy docu-soap that’s been “trending” everywhere since it dropped on Netflix last weekend — it is the reveal about a split: when our flowing-haired heroine Chrishell Stause discovers that her husband, actor Justin Hartley, has gone and axed their marriage via dancing letters on a tiny screen.
The off-screen blindside — coming as it did mere weeks before production was set to wrap on the show, set in the world of luxe listings and L.A. thirst-traps — was quickly digested into its main storyline and, in so doing, has entered the vault of ickiest celebrity breakups.
The heads-up given by the “This Is Us” actor and her one-time fellow soap star is officially up there now with that time Phil Collins famously cut things off with his wife via fax (he was on tour, people!), the time Billy Bob Thornton simply ghosted his then-girlfriend Laura Dern by marrying Angelina Jolie (these things happen) and — my own personal fave — that OMG moment in the ’90s when Minnie Driver learned Matt Damon had dumped her when the actor told Oprah on her show that he was single (“fantastically inappropriate,” is how Driver described the scenario later).
As far as divorce-by-text goes, it may not have been the first — “Let’s just say I haven’t heard from since he texted me saying he was divorcing me December 31, 2011,” Katy Perry once shared re: her 14-month marriage to Russell Brand — but the “Selling Sunset” story has been the most thorough, for sure. Sensitively handled over multiple episodes — with gooey background music and a you-go-girl undercurrent — it was, I thought, emotional narrative doubling as celebrity warfare.
Armed with the artillery of reality TV, Chrishell had, I also observed, managed the best breakup storytelling since Jen Garner did that decisive Vanity Fair cover story, post-messyBen Affleck-split.
But doing a mere magazine cover story, in the name of post-split positioning in the court of public opinion? Kinda old school. Doing it with cameras in tow, and with the capacity to craft your own story within the story, sorta genius.
Exhibit A: After a scene in which we see Stause’s colleagues at Oppenheim Group find out about her marital crash-and-burn via a Google Alert (a Google Alert on “Selling Sunset,” no doubt — already kinda meta), we see one of her mates, Mary, go to the wounded damsel inside the Four Seasons suite she’s hiding out in. Recounting that she and her husband had had a fight over the phone, but that the idea of divorce came as a shock, she says, wiping tears, “I found out because he texted me that we were filed. Forty-five minutes later, the world knew.”
Then there is a subsequent conversation, with another colleague, Amanza, to whom Stause confides that she wrote a goodbye letter to Hartley’s child from a previous marriage (the daughter of the soap actress he married two soap actresses ago). At that point, she drops the bread crumbs of a theory: Hartley’s rise to fame may have exacerbated their split.
“It’s not normal to meet somebody and then become wildly famous or become wildly rich and all these things. I don’t, at the end of the day, think that those things matter,” she says with authenticity oozing from her pores. “Your feelings obviously changed for me at some point, but I just feel like that’s how you’d treat the garbage that you throw out.” Ouch. Reading between the lines — and having followed both Justin and Chrishell for years, from their soap days, and chatted with them at a Golden Globes party in L.A. two years ago — the way I interpreted those words was this: this was a classic case of fame-imbalance and a study in the different rungs of celebrity. While both actors started off in the sixdegrees pond of daytime drama — Stause on “All My Children” and “Days of Our Lives,” Hartley on “Passions,” and later “The Young and the Restless” — their world changed dramatically when Justin got cast on the prime-time NBC hit “This Is Us” (one of the few network shows to get major numbers, but it also became simply a part of the mainstream noise, along the way).
While his wattage was increasing, she had turned to real estate — a kind of side hustle not uncommon to many current and ex-soap stars in what’s become a dwindling “soap economy,” if you will. (There are only four soaps left on the air, as I have written in this space before, compared to the eight that ran on TV every weekday about a decade ago, and 12 on the air in the ’90s.)
While some actors in the medium have been able to leverage their face-time in other ways — Stause’s one-time “All My Children” co-star Kelly Ripa becoming a talk show mainstay, with others from the same soap, Michael B. Jordan and Josh Duhamel, for instance, breaking into movies — others stick to being professional soap-hoppers or, well, in the case of Stause, moving into selling million-dollar houses, with a dip into reality TV (which, after all, does follow some of the same syntaxes of a soap).
The irony? Because of the stickiness of “Selling Sunset” in the zeitgeist — partly because it is available on the superpopular platform that is Netflix — and because of Hartley’s roguish behaviour, Stause herself has never been more famous. “From the moment we heard about it, we made a very conscious choice to protect Chrishell as much as we could,” Adam DiVello, the creator of the show, shared with the L.A Times recently about the reallife pivot. The guy who famously created “The Hills” — another gut-getting show of its era — went on to reveal that they even did her the courtesy of “walking her through the scenes we were going to be using, just to make sure she was comfortable before we locked them.”
Going all “Eat Pray Love” on us, that may be one of the reasons the final shot of the season is a pan of Stause looking cathartically out the windows of a new home, overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Admitting that he loved the solitude of that shot, DiVello said, “This is a girl we’ve followed all over the Valley and now she’s propped up in the hills, as if she can see everything that’s ahead of her.”
To which, I say: chef ’s kiss!