There Will Be No ‘Selling Sunset’ Season 8 Reunion, Amid Cast Mutiny (EXCLUSIVE)
SPOILER ALERT: Though this article is a news story, it also contains spoilers for Season 8 of “Selling Sunset.”
The drama among the “Selling Sunset” cast continues to spill out onto social media and in the press, but sadly for viewers, Netflix will not be filming a reunion for Season 8 of the show. Reunions for “Selling Sunset” aren’t ritualized in the way that reunions for Bravo shows are, but after the Netflix series produced its first one in 2022 for Season 5, the cast sitting down with “Queer Eye” star Tan France for a special that drops within two weeks of the season is something that audiences have grown to expect. And after a messy eighth season of the popular real estate show, the castmates of “Selling Sunset” have a lot to discuss in front of their fans — but won’t be doing so. (Netflix’s representatives had no comment.)
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The melodrama is manifold. Season 8 of “Selling Sunset” premiered on Sept. 6, but even before that, the show’s stars had begun expressing anger about what viewers would be seeing within it. Specifically, the week before the premiere, Chrishell Stause — the closest “Selling Sunset” has to a point-of-view character, in that her joining the Oppenheim Group in Season 1 in 2019 kicked off the series — took to Instagram for what would turn out to be many posts. She called out fellow castmate Nicole Young, writing, “I will NEVER work on a show with her on it again. I would rather be sued.” In the same Instagram story, she tagged the show’s producers, Adam DiVello’s Done and Done Productions, adding, “And you are disgusting for blindsiding her with this to see with the world instead of letting her at LEAST defend herself with the TRUTH.”
At issue: Throughout this season, Young, who joined the cast in Season 6, repeatedly floats an unsubstantiated claim that Emma Hernan, one of Stause’s closest friends on the show, is having an affair with a married man. Young brings this topic up on camera three times, despite most of her castmates showing little to no interest in engaging about it. The first mention is during a trip to the desert, when everyone pretends not to know what Young is talking about until she stops. The second instance is more extensive. In the penultimate episode, Young says in a confessional interview, after having brought it up once again in front of fellow realtors Mary Bonnet and newcomer Alanna Whittaker, “I did hear from a reliable source that Emma has likely had relations with a married man.” She then adds elliptically: “There are certain people you shouldn’t be involved with. Particularly if certain people have, I don’t know, certain jewelry on certain parts of their fingers.” In the finale, Young raises the subject once more — when speaking with castmate Bre Tiesi, she then twists the conversation around to Hernan, saying, “I’d be careful in her position, because she’s been involved with people she shouldn’t have been.” Tiesi replies, “Married people?” Young says: “I wouldn’t trust Emma with my husband,” and then tells Tiesi that her source confronted Hernan. (In this conversation, Young finally found a willing audience, with Tiesi telling her, “I wish I would have known this earlier — this would have been valuable information.”)
That’s one layer of the cast’s in-fighting that won’t be resolved by a reunion episode. The other one involves Tiesi’s feud with Chelsea Lazkani.
Tiesi and Lazkani have hated each other from the start. In Season 6, Lazkani greeted new cast member Tiesi — who has a child with profligate father Nick Cannon — by judging her arrangement with Cannon, in which she is one of a number of mothers of his children. On the show, Lazkani called their relationship “rather off-putting,” and said “the way I live my life is very different to her as a Christian.” Tiesi, no shrinking violet, naturally fought back against Lazkani’s judgment, and though they’ve called occasional truces since, they just don’t get along.
Cut to Season 8, in which Tiesi gets a call frrom her realtor friend Amanda Lynn, whom she then meets for lunch. On camera, Lynn shows Tiesi text messages sent by a friend saying they’d witnessed Lazkani’s husband cheating on her at the W’s Residences in Hollywood. Tiesi appears to have a dilemma: Should she tell her sworn enemy Lazkani about the cheating? Of course she does: The two have a drink, and what seems to be a heartfelt conversation, shedding tears and bonding. This communing doesn’t last, of course, and by the finale, Tiesi and Lynn — whose past racist tweets have resurfaced after she put herself in the public eye — are casing the office of the Oppenheim Group, looking to be in full villain mode. In the second to last scene of the season, Lynn sits down purposefully at Lazkani’s desk, as Tiesi calls boss Jason Oppenheim wanting to introduce him to Lynn. And in the final moments of Season 8, Lazkani takes her wedding ring off during a confessional, as she walks into a house she’s expressed interest in buying.
During the press cycle for Season 8, meanwhile, Tiesi has blown up this entire timeline. In a sitdown interview with Brice Sander of “Entertainment Tonight” this week, she said she found out off-camera — in December of last year about Lazkani’s husband cheating, and called Hernan so she could tell Lazkani, which Tiesi says Hernan did. From there, according to Tiesi, “Chelsea calls me directly. We have a full conversation. Very, very clear. She knows exactly every detail, and we were in good standing.” She and Lynn then shot the lunch scene for the show in March of this year, and Lynn showed her the “receipts” from Lynn’s friend about the cheating — for the first time, Tiesi says. (March is also when People broke the news that Lazkani had filed for divorce.) For her part, Lazkani pretty much confirmed this timeline on X (though clearly not Tiesi’s benevolent intentions), tweeting, “I hear what is swirling while filming, and I ask production to set up a scene with Bre. I did this so she could tell me directly, so that it’s not past around to a trillion people before me. Hope this helps!” Lazkani also tweeted, “Made it clear and putting it in writing, if racist Amanda is on the show as a cast member. I’m out.”
“Selling Sunset” is in many ways about artifice. Like DiVello’s previous shows “Laguna Beach” and “The Hills” for MTV, it shows Southern California as a gorgeous tableau, and it highlights the most picturesque aspects of Los Angeles to illustrate why the “Selling Sunset” realtors’ clients would want to drop millions or even tens of millions of dollars to live here. Its staged aspects — shooting and reshooting scenes — have always been obvious, even if never quite this obvious. As opposed to previous years, Netflix did not shoot two seasons back to back, and hasn’t announced a renewal of the series yet. And the cast uprising does feel very real, if not quite existential. For now, at least, the future of “Selling Sunset” has a haze over it that DiVello might show in a scenic view of downtown Los Angeles.
On the other hand, “Selling Sunset” is currently No. 2 in Netflix’s Top 10 for the U.S., No. 6 in the global Top 10 and, according to the streamer’s public data, is being watched all around the world. So let’s assume that — as the realtors of “Selling Sunset” know as much as anyone — everything is negotiable.
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