Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Owning Manhattan’ on Netflix, Featuring Former Bravo Broker Ryan Serhant And His New Name-Brand Agency 

With Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York, Ryan Serhant became a real estate star. But with a jump to Netflix and Owning Manhattan, the New York City broker and reality show veteran intends to build an empire. You can’t close every deal personally when you’re the boss, so Owning Manhattan has surrounded Serhant with a coterie of closers – top producers, determined climbers, impression makers, and designated disruptors – all working at SERHANT’s SoHo HQ and elbowing each other out of the big boss’s eyeline. Will Ryan Serhant achieve his goal of taking his namesake brokerage all the way to the top spot in town? With all of the clashing personalities in the office, do you even care? Either way, the reality real estate wing of Netflix’s streaming holdings has a flashy new tenant.    

OWNING MANHATTAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: We get a few standard beauty shots of Manhattan before pushing inside Ryan Serhant’s glittering multi-floor Brooklyn townhome. This is the same spot Serhant and his wife Emilia Bechrakis gut rehabbed on Bravo for Ryan’s Renovation, their 2021 MDLNY spinoff. 

The Gist: It’s the persona you know from that other channel, now on Netflix and surrounded by a built-out fleet of personality archetypes. As Serhant rolls to his offices in a chauffeured Range Rover, he takes a moment to wax philosophical, referring to cemeteries as places full of wasted potential. Basically, if you aren’t selling, you’re dying. “I’m one of the top, if not the top, real estate brokers in the world, and I do over a billion dollars in sales every year.” SERHANT, which he founded after twelve years in the business and ten in the reality show trenches, is the number six brokerage in New York City, with 350 agents, and at a boisterous sales huddle, those with big recent sales get to autograph a wall next to their monetary figure. It validates what they got in front of everyone who didn’t.

This is the environment at SERHANT. Bring your “AAAAAAAA” game, says the boss. And his outfit will need it if they’re gonna land a buyer for a gargantuan trophy penthouse in Central Park Tower, which Serhant has three months to sell. 17,545 square feet, 11 bathrooms, a ballroom overlooking the park, and a curved glass staircase, all for $250 million. While Serhant initially puts experienced agent Kayla on that job, back at headquarters we also meet swaggering veteran seller Nile, successful Brooklyn real estate expert Tricia Lee (her fiance Jeff is also an agent at SERHANT), and a few other agents, including Jess T, Jess M, and Jordan H. “The office is 100% like a Lifetime movie,” Jordan says in a cutaway. “Don’t you need a little bit of crazy to do real estate in New York?”

The agents highlighted in Owning Manhattan are a mix of savvy vets, promising up-and-comers, and even individuals like Savannah, a younger North Carolina transplant who Serhant says he hired as part of his brokerage’s apprentice program. This multilevel mix is deliberate, and becomes immediately relevant once he pits their personalities and sales goals against one another. When Kayla’s well-heeled buyer begs off the penthouse, Serhant puts a handful of his top people on the property. “Work your networks,” he encourages them, but it’s the potential for an individual ten-million-dollar commission that really lights them up. For Ryan Serhant and his team, it’s all about the drive to survive and thrive, and to look good doing it. “Let the games begin.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Serhant departed Million Dollar Listing New York in 2021, and the series has since been canceled, though it lasted longer than other one-and-done spinoffs from the still-extant mothership, Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles. And the sharks-in-the-water vibe of the competing agents at SERHANT is definitely trying for the energy of Selling Sunset, Selling the O.C., and Buying London, which are all part of Netflix’s booming real estate reality portfolio.   

Our Take: The format of Owning Manhattan is so familiar, it utterly fades into the background. Follow its generic power-up music cues featuring soundalikes of current pop and hip-hop hits to oohing and ahhing hero shots of expensive New York real estate properties. Take in brief encounters with the sellers and buyers, like a woman putting her Hudson Square condo on the market because she’s moving back to Montecito, or NBA player Taj Gibson, looking at a rehabbed Victorian in Brooklyn. And take a second to consider how you’d stage nearly 18,000 square feet of glass-paneled views onto Central Park. None of this is distinct to Owning Manhattan. The aspirational element is identical to every other luxury real estate show in the unscripted universe. But the best of those shows also feature watchable personalities, and Netflix has a good one in Ryan Serhant.

He’s got a Ryan Reynolds-esque charm, and he knows it. He’s been doing real estate in the reality space for a decade, and is familiar with playing to the viewing audience as much as the storylines on offer. In short, Serhant’s smooth. But he also manages to convey a genuine earnestness about his vocation. At the pricey Central Park Tower property, he points out that people still need a place to prepare cereal in the morning, no matter how wealthy they are. And there’s no doubt SERHANT is both his professional pride and joy and a personal challenge, making the prompts he prepares for his agents part of a reality framework and the price of doing business. 

Less smooth than Serhant is how Owning Manhattan handles that gaggle of agents. Some of the one-on-ones between them feel really forced, or even re-shot. A lot of them spout the same vague business book pablum, like “competition fuels greatness.” And more than one of these people explain their skyline-sized goals as a foregone conclusion. A few of them are sure to rise to the occasion, but at least initially, they’re cut from very similar cloth. Then a young dude with neck tats and a dismissive view of the veteran agents shows up to blow it up. “People are scared of change,” Jonathan says in his cutaway. “Especially successful change. My brand is celebrities, Instagram models; it’s crypto guys.” It’s an exhausting quote. But it’s probably good for the environment Owning Manhattan is building.

Sex and Skin: It’s a uniform. Tailored power suits in bold colors, accented with heaps of expensive-looking jewelry, or with select panels, folds, or lapels loosened to reveal cleavage, muscles, a spray of tattoos, or all three. This is the articulated look in Owning Manhattan. “90% of real estate brokers in New York make less than 40K,” one young agent says. But just so you know, working at SERHANT, that ain’t it. “40K is…I mean, my…my watch is five times that.” 

Parting Shot: The opening installment of Owning Manhattan is pretty breezy, but in scenes from the season to come, things turn catty and foul-mouthy. Even outwardly calm and collected Ryan Serhant loses his cool. “Either hold yourself to a higher standard at this company, or go start your own fucking company.”

Sleeper Star: “She��s giving me the zang, and I’m trying to come back with the zing.” With her Broadway background and omnipresent poodle, Chloe’s personality appears to be as bold as Ryan Serhant believes. And given how he’s already aligning the goals of his more junior agent against cocky Nile’s market smarts and billionaire connections, Chloe will be one to watch as she aims for the top of the SERHANT hierarchy. 

Most Pilot-y Line: Serhant’s got goals. “Right now, we are the number six brokerage in New York City. But I don’t wanna be sixth at anything. I bet my entire life, my house, and every single dollar I have, ‘cause I am self-funded here, on the success of this business. So, it, you know…so it has to work.”

Our Call: STREAM IT, particularly if you’re already down with Netflix’s suite of unscripted real estate shows. It’s more in that same vein – or in the vein of competing series at Bravo – with a lot of big money looks and lux properties in the mix, and Ryan Serhant’s established reality TV persona at the center of it all.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.