From 'The Better Sister' To 'Sirens', TV Has Reached Peak Eat The Rich
There's a scene in The Better Sister, Amazon's glossy thriller starring Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks, when Matthew Modine's high-powered lawyer Bill Braddock, is anxious to avoid the unpleasantness that an unsolved murder brings to a coffee date. Halfway through the conversation, he turns to Biel's Editor-in-Chief Chloe Taylor, and drawls 'I was hoping we could all go back to being rich and powerful people again'.
Arguably, it's a sentence that sums up where TV is in 2025 - rich and powerful characters and narratives dominate like never before. The Better Sister is set in the world of Manhattan's elite, and their summer houses in East Hampton. Sirens, meanwhile, tells the story of a wealthy couple - Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon - on their lavish island-based estate, complete with a lifestyle featuring yachts and galas, and a lower class troublemaker in the shape of Meghann Fahy.
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There's also the second series of Nine Perfect Strangers, the Nicole Kidman drama which sees the superrich embark on a wellness retreat, this time in an alpine resort, and Mountainhead, the film by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, about a group of billionaires also on a retreat, while the world burns.
Across series and films, these characters might have a lot materially but there's one thing they are missing: a moral compass. This is eat the rich TV - stories that centre the lives, environments and habits of the 1% but, crucially, also zero in on their flaws. That combination - whether it comes through satire or melodrama - is irresistible because it allows us, the other 99%, to watch along and feel good about ourselves as we binge a boxset over a Tuesday night stir fry.
Eat the rich TV is not new. This current wave started in 2018 with Succession, Armstrong's acerbic drama about the Roy family, a series that still fuels memes and fashion put-downs (see that famous 'ludicrously capacious bag'), and continued with The White Lotus, as well as films like Glass Onion and The Menu. In 2023, Laura Craik wrote for ELLE UK on the trend, arguing the theme 'invites you to envy the characters' lifestyle and hate their entitlement but also to feel peculiarly sorry for them. Imagine drinking Veuve Cliquot at breakfast before nodding off on your sun-lounger, your diamonds glinting in the sun – yet still feeling empty inside'.
In 2023, satire was the essential ingredient to eat the rich TV. As someone with progressive politics, you could watch shows with the superrich at play because the absurdity of their extravagance and entitlement was the joke. But it feels different two years on. The bite has become less sharp. Sirens, for example, ends with the assistant, played by Milly Alcock, becoming the new wife to Bacon's billionaire, with Moore cast aside, back on the ferry with the plebs. Sure, it's a bleak comment on the lure of money, but it also feels closer to a glamorous soap opera than the whipsmart sting that made Succession feel so potent.
While we still devour these series, the impact is lessening. Despite star turns from legit A-listers like Moore, Fahy, Bacon and Kidman, these shows have less of an afterlife, burning bright in WhatsApp chats for the week they are launched, and soon to be forgotten. Reviews are also less than stellar - The Guardian gave the latest series of Nine Perfect Strangers two stars, while Mountainhead is being slated in Letterboxd - and the unthinkable even happened earlier this year when there was disappointment around the latest series of The White Lotus.
Perhaps part of this is down to the world beyond the boxset. If, as the eat the rich TV era began, our outrage around the superrich was strong, in 2025 Donald Trump is back in the White House and Jeff Bezos is spending $10m on his 200 person wedding in Venice this month (that's $50,000 per guest). This is the new normal, reality is stranger than any fiction could be, so stories about rich people and their morally reprehensible behaviour no longer land in the same way.
Will we still be watching glossy women doing bad things in designer outfits in impossibly glamorous destinations in two years' time, or will we be back down to earth? It's worth thinking about the last TV show to really make ripples: Adolescence. While the impact of the four-part series is about way more than the working-class world in which its partially set, it does show that while we might like eat the rich TV, it could also be time to change the channel.
The Better Sister is now streaming on Prime. Sirens is available to watch on Netflix.
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