Despite Owning Manhattan following his real estate brokerage, Ryan Serhant made a surprise admission about not needing for the show to feature onscreen house sales.
“Everything is real [on the show] because everything else is big and everyone has a facade, everyone lies. Nothing is real, I believe nothing,” Serhant, 41, quipped during an exclusive interview with Us Weekly. “So it would be a disservice to the world to create another fake reality TV show.”
Serhant had “literally zero interest” in manufacturing success.
“I was totally fine going into filming if we do no deals. But we tried really hard. Even if all the deals died or fell apart and the company had to file for bankruptcy,” he joked. “That is the season finale of a show that I would watch. It’d be terrible for my real life but it would be the reality of it. It’s refreshing in a way that I haven’t seen in this format before.”
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The real estate mogul and CEO of SERHANT previously appeared on Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing: New York from 2012 to 2021. He then starred in the 2017 spinoffs Sell It Like Serhant and Ryan’s Renovation. Serhant’s history with reality TV allowed him to help make Owning Manhattan stand out as a real estate show that prioritizes unique storytelling.
“What made season 1 so special — and the reason I wanted to do it — is because I spent 10 years on Million Dollar Listing New York for Bravo. I wanted to make a deal show. People love Shark Tank and like deal shows in the scripted world such as Succession and Gossip Girl. Owning Manhattan is not about the drama. It’s about the deals,” he noted to Us. “It is also about what happens because of the deals — and they’re real deals.”
Serhant encouraged viewers to follow along online.
“One of the fun things about Owning Manhattan is people can watch the show and then follow along on social media, on the MLS and in the press. They can see if a deal is really closed,” he explained. “It’s what makes this show so different.”
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In addition to starring in Owning Manhattan, Serhant’s role as executive producer allowed him to lean into his creativity when it came to the show’s structure.
“To do something big and scary that people haven’t seen before like talking to [a] camera in a reality show, having voiceovers and we have one takes in this show. Or the camera just follows the back of my head as I’m about to go do something insane and there’s drones flying through the city — it just really sets the world,” he noted. “It lets the audience know this is not something you’ve seen before and this is worth watching. … I give Netflix a lot of credit for allowing us to play and allowing me to really, really push the envelope on format.”
Owning Manhattan is streaming on Netflix.
