Current Mood: Rich people behaving badly

Screwball Comedies. Showbiz Musicals. Mockumentaries. These are just three of the categories Netflix allows you to niftily sort its content into. Alas, there is no section (yet) for my absolute favourite genre of film and TV: Rich People Behaving Appallingly (sub-categories: People Emotionally Crumbling While Wearing Five-Figure Outfits and Dark Secrets Emerge in Homes with His-And-Hers Spa Bathrooms).

I want tense conversations over marble kitchen islands the size of a studio flat and waking up in a sweat on Hästens beds with Frette sheets. Unsurprisingly, then, I polished off Netflix’s glossy new prestige drama Anatomy of a Scandal in one greedy helping. Its exploration of topics including consent, power and privilege was interesting (and unfortunately timely) but I doubt I would have gobbled it up so quickly were it not also for the hefty helping of glossy lifestyle content.

Anatomy of a Scandal has a lot of that; Oxford and Westminster, Range Rovers and free-standing baths, kids in boater hats and Sienna Miller in a goddam white dress from The Row. There’s been a solid run of these shows recently: Succession, White Lotus, The Crown, Inventing Anna, all of Nicole Kidman’s recent small screen ventures (Nine Perfect Strangers, The Undoing, Big Little Lies). Are you still watching? Silly question. Of course we are! But what is the appeal of watching the wealthy, beautiful and influential in meltdown mode?

I think, for one, it is a soothing reminder that all the privilege in the world cannot necessarily immunise you against pain, that your problems would still exist in a £10 million townhouse. Hell, they might even be bigger. More than that, however, these shows are often a chance to witness a comeuppance that rarely comes in the ‘real’ world. Watching those in positions of unearned privilege cannibalise their own perfect lives at least gives the illusion of justice.

But what these shows also guarantee is escapism. I will sit through the worst of them, turn a blind eye to the clunkiest of dialogue and most ludicrous of plot holes for the chance to watch an extended Architectural Digest house tour. So, as you can imagine, I am delighted to know that Ten Percent, the British remake of Call My Agent, is landing on Amazon Prime on 28th April. Because there is nobody more capable of behaving badly, but looking great doing it, than a coddled celebrity.

Laura