TV’s hottest new character: Rich-people closets | Canada Voices

There’s a sexy new star all over your TV right now: the billionaire bedroom closet. Whether it’s in the Prime Video film A Simple Favor, the upcoming Netflix series Sirens (due May 22) or the current AppleTV+ series Your Friends & Neighbors, the ultra-luxe walk-in is the status symbol du jour. (I haven‘t yet toured Carrie Bradshaw’s closet in her new place on Gramercy Park West – season three of And Just Like That drops on Max/Crave on May 29 – but given the closet porn of the entire Sex and the City franchise, I bet it’s a doozy.)

In these splendiferous dressing rooms, styled like a high-end boutique, only more elegant, ranks of $2,000 stilettos beckon from angled shelves behind thick glass doors. Plush suits, crisp shirts and gossamer gowns float on racks engineered to accommodate their precise lengths. On the vanities in the centre of these rooms, jewelry glints on velvet stands – a Cartier Panthère bracelet, anyone?

And rooms, plural, these closets are, with full-on furniture: poufs and makeup tables, lounge chairs and three-way mirrors. These closets have windows, and the windows have views. Their male owners store their timepiece collections in tiered glass cabinets or flannel-lined watch drawers. Their female owners display their crocodile and ostrich handbags in lighted niches worthy of museums, or line them up on dressing tables like stacks of bullion in bank vaults.

On A Simple Favor – which came out in 2018 but is popular again because its sequel, Another Simple Favor, just dropped – the gorgeous, crème-coloured closet is owned by the gorgeous, enigmatic Emily (Blake Lively). In a dramatic sequence at the midpoint, Stephanie (Anna Kendrick), Emily’s not-so-innocent friend, enters to pack up Emily’s goods to the beat of a French pop song about Bonnie and Clyde. The camera pans over Emily’s sequins, lace and Louboutins as if it wants to eat them. When Stephanie discovers both a dildo and a gun, she flinches, clearly not worthy of this temple of hedonism. A scene later, Emily’s things mysteriously reappear, affirming that they belong there more than Stephanie ever could.

In Sirens– set on an Isle of Richness that looks a lot like Nantucket, in a stunning compound owned by Peter (Kevin Bacon), a hedge-fund guy worth billions, and his icily serene, gently-ageing trophy wife Michaela (Julianne Moore) – we’re treated to three closets: The rich guy’s down the road is thick with ridged Rimowa suitcases. Simone’s (Milly Alcock) – she’s Michaela’s executive assistant – is painted a custom dusty peach, and features racks of Lilly Pulitzer flowered shifts and shelves of jellybean-coloured sneakers.

But of course, Michaela’s wardrobe-land is the most opulent of all, with its spotlights and chandeliers, its glass pocket doors and security cameras, and a safe snugged under its cushioned window seat. Its drawers of French lingerie are spritzed daily by Michaela with lavender from a crystal mister. It’s so vast, Michaela takes meetings there with her phalanx of staff. And it doesn‘t just have a lounge chair, it has a lounge area, outfitted with enough infrared face masks to service a spa.

Over on Your Friends & Neighbors, the closets should have second billing, right after star Jon Hamm. He plays Coop, a disgraced hedge fund bro who turns to cat burglary, selectively pilfering from his posh pals while they’re out at galas. Each episode builds to the moment Coop enters a closet, as if he’s a tomb raider breaking into the burial chambers of pharaohs.

My favourite so far is the dressing room of a woman who collects high-end handbags. As Coop approaches, their handles hover suggestively at the bottom of the frame, teasing us in the way old Hollywood films introduced a new starlet by showing us just an eye or ankle. So when the big reveal comes – more than a dozen Hermès Birkins! In all sizes and colours! Priced $20,000 to $100,000! – we swoon.

As Coop peruses the goods, he rattles off a primer on Rich People’s Stuff – in the same smooth-pitchman voice-over, wink wink, that Hamm uses IRL to narrate Mercedes-Benz commercials. “The Richard Mille Felipe Massa automatic chronograph with a signature rose gold and titanium skeleton and flyback function,” he intones, adding that it sells for US$225,000. Or, “The Hermès Birkin, handcrafted in France by an elusive cabal of craftsmen trained in centuries-old equestrian trade techniques, using only the highest-end leather, exotic animal skins, stitching and hardware,” available only to those who purchase their way onto the waiting list.

So why is everyone on TV suddenly, surreally rich? Yes, in most shows, people have nicer coats or bigger living rooms than the average Joe, but current series are preoccupied with truly staggering wealth: the multigenerational cattle barons on the Yellowstone franchise and the oil titans on Landman, both on Paramount+. The mafioso family into which Emily is marrying in Another Simple Favor, whose budget for wedding flowers looks like it exceeds the GDPs of most nations. The influencers on Nine Perfect Strangers, who drive BMWs and Lamborghinis, and pay a fortune to forest bathe in Nicole Kidman‘s “award-winning arboretum.” (Season two, set in an alpine mansion, drops on Prime Video on May 21.)

The Monterey money in Big Little Lies (Max/Crave), with its gleaming modern houses above the crashing Pacific; the Nantucket money in The Perfect Couple (Netflix), with its heirloom family compounds above the crashing Atlantic. The new (stolen) tech money meeting the old (ill-gotten) British estate money in Surface (AppleTV+). Even the three “average” couples in The Four Seasons (Netflix) can afford four deluxe vacations per year, at lake houses, ski lodges, chichi university-town inns and all-inclusive resorts.

What fascinates me is the tone of these series: They ask us to revile these closets, this lifestyle, and also to covet it. The maids, cooks and gardeners on Sirens slam Simone in a not-so-secret text chain, and there’s a hilarious shot of valets searching for car keys that a clueless scion has tossed carelessly onto a rolling lawn. Coop mocks the people he steals from, calling their Birkins “obnoxious and coveted,” and dragging them as COINs (collectors in name only) who don‘t care about art “but regard it as a sexy investment.” A robber baron on Surface even justifies committing murder: “Yes, all this was given to us,” he says calmly, “but in order to keep it one must make sacrifices.”

There’s so much wealth-porn bubbling around us nowadays. We envy-scroll through our friends’ Nile-barge-vacation photos on Instagram and watch strangers we feel we know scoop caviar on TikTok. Celebrities in outlandish designer confections swan up the steps at the Met Gala, where “real people” – who can they be? – pay US$75,000 per ticket. Donald Trump lines his family’s pockets in plain sight, with crypto schemes and Saudi Arabian land deals. It all looks so great and also so terrible, but how can they afford it, and why can‘t I afford it, and how might I get mine?

When Coop says, “In life you don‘t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate,” then refuses to drink Scotch unless it’s at least 25 years old, then zooms his $200,000 Maserati GranTurismo past the valets to the front of his country club because he can‘t be bothered to wait in line, we see he’s a jerk and wish we were like him. These TV series are onto us, and they’re feeding our ambivalent yearnings via our own algorithms.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been watching two series about historical rich folks: Carême (AppleTV+), about the real chef who cooked for Napoleon and Tsar Alexander; and The Empress (Netflix), about Elisabeth (Sisi), princess of Bavaria, who tried to address the poverty and inequity in 19th-century Habsburg Europe. (You can visit her statue on your next luxury excursion to Vienna.) Both are set in magnificent palaces amid unimaginable wealth. Both feature fabulous wardrobes, though no glimpses of closets as yet (I’d so love to see the rooms where the gowns of Sisi and her glamorous mother-in-law are stored). And both feel thoroughly relevant to our current moment. It’s worth remembering that, for their generation of super-rich, things did not end well.