Incredibly rich people: they’re arguably destroying our planet, they almost always smell good, and, for better or for worse, they’re really fun to watch on TV. While reality shows like The Kardashians and Selling Sunset are a perfectly good place to feast your eyes on ludicrously expensive real estate and watch people whose weekly earnings are more than many small nations’ annual GDP fight about basically nothing, I’ve always been partial to the way wealth is portrayed in scripted television: It’s the perfect format for exploring deranged excess without (necessarily) glorifying it.
To that end, we’ve rounded up seven of the all-time best wealth-forward TV shows that allow us to gawk at rich-person interior design and interpersonal interactions to our heart’s content. See them all below.
The O.C.
Ah, the show that launched it all, if by “it” you mean a lasting cultural obsession with Southern California excess, newsboy caps (how did Marissa Cooper make those look good?), and Yogalates. The real-life area of Orange County that The O.C. is based on also skews pretty wealthy and conservative, but it’s nothing compared to the over-the-top version that creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage presented onscreen.
