Reality Bites
When Zach Erdem got a pitch from an executive at TLC to film a reality show about his upscale Southampton restaurant, 75 Main, he couldn’t say no. He’d received offers from other networks before, but this one felt personal and flattering, indicating an interest in his life story as an immigrant. He accepted, and the production machine kicked into gear; two weeks later, a crew showed up and filmed for six weeks straight.
The resulting show, Serving the Hamptons, aired for two seasons in 2022 and 2024 and followed 75 Main’s staff as it worked, partied, and argued its way through the restaurant’s crazy season. In typical reality-television fashion, the show leans into raunchy hookups and exaggerated drama, like the time when cast member Jill Gough — who also happens to be Lindsay Lohan’s first cousin — crashed her boss’s birthday party. Though the restaurant already enjoyed success and stability, Erdem says, sales increased by 20 percent after the first season aired.
Not everyone appreciated 75 Main’s new star power. The restaurant started attracting a noisier clientele: more tourists, more young people, and more influencers. Many of Erdem’s regulars, particularly the older crowd, felt alienated by the buzz and camera crews. Some began to avoid the restaurant on filming days, resentful of the disruption to their meals. “I personally got text messages asking, ‘Are you filming today?’ ” says Erdem. “That was actually kind of upsetting.”
Reality-show producers can’t seem to get enough of the East End. A backdrop of pale beaches and fancy restaurants, B-roll of the leisure class idling, and the voyeurism of watching the ultrarich throw money at the wind conspire to capture viewers’ attention. “Anybody in the world will be curious to see how these people live,” says Erdem.
But how do the people who actually live here feel about the shows?
By tradition stretching back into the 19th century, the South Fork’s summer inhabitants — the tall-hedge community — have maintained a suspicion of flashy outsiders and preferred privacy and quietude. Certainly old-time locals prefer, by and large, to be left alone. At the same time, businesses often need to make enough money in summer to sustain themselves through the off-season, and any form of heightened exposure may help. That dissonance defines the core tension of the East End’s seasonality: Locals begrudge tourists and influencers for descending on their home turf and behaving in a way that only proves how ephemeral their ties to it are, and how little they care — yet these same locals often rely on the good will of those visitors to make a living. Reality TV shows have become a particularly contentious flashpoint in this uncomfortable dynamic.
Back in 2012, when fedora-sporting hipsters became the poster children for partying and entitlement, Montauk residents launched a No Fedora campaign, posting signs that condemned the trendy hat and its wearers. When the Kardashian sisters sought to shoot their 2014 show Kourtney and Khloé Take the Hamptons on the East End, locals launched a multi-town sticker campaign in resistance, plastering a crossed-out image of the sisters’ faces with a hashtag #NoDash branded across it. TMZ even reported that the Kardashians had a hard time renting a house to film it in, turned away by homeowners who didn’t want to be associated with the reality stars.
Ari Selinger, a filmmaker who lives part time in Sag Harbor, felt the impact of this antipathy while working on his own independent project: a narrative film based on the true tale of a real-life Montauk mechanic, Thomas Ferreira, whose car-
cluttered yard aroused the ire of the neighborhood aesthetics police. Wary business owners and homeowners would ask Selinger if he was “with the Kardashians,” but softened to his requests when he could confirm he wasn’t filming a reality show.
“It’s exponentially harder because of those shows,” says Selinger of filming on the East End. “They’re protective out there. They have a legacy to sort of maintain and there’s always a kind of antagonistic relationship, I feel, between the people that come in from the city and the locals.”
East End townships typically adopt a protective stance, too, imposing rental restrictions and strict regulations on filming.
The area’s most popular reality show, Summer House, follows a group of young New York professionals who work in the city during the week and spend weekends in a Hamptons share house. It’s the third most-viewed show on Bravo at press time, with its most recent season premiere drawing over two million viewers. Although the show mainly plays out in an airy mansion, removed from the community in which it takes place, it has battled regulative pushback since its inception. Though advertised as taking place in Montauk, its first season actually filmed in Amagansett (invoking ridicule in certain quarters) and was subsequently forced to move to Water Mill and Sag Harbor because of film regulations.
Earlier this year, the tenth season of Summer House ended in a romantic scandal that shocked longtime fans. It also coincided with the sale of the Sag Harbor house where the show had been filmed for the past five seasons.
East Hampton Star archives show that the very concept of a “share house” or “group house,” on which several reality shows are premised, has been under assault since the late 1960s, when there was a wave of panic over young singles shacking up for the summer and “playing loud rock music at all hours” (as it was reported in The Star at the time). East Hampton Town began imposing bans on group rentals as early as 1976, and it has long been unlawful to divvy up a seasonal lease into “shares” or occupancy rights to individual bedrooms; there are limits on the number of unrelated adults who are allowed to rent a place together.
During the filming of its 2022 season, Summer House came up against Southampton zoning restrictions when the cast’s shingled McMansion in Water Mill was discovered to have been illegally expanded to accommodate the large cast with a surplus of bedrooms. The new location for Summer House is yet to be confirmed, leaving the show’s future in a period of uncertainty. In May this year, a Manhattan-based Summer House spinoff called In the City aired for the first time, offering a version of the show that pulls away from the East End altogether.
The hostility toward group houses shapes the version of the South Fork that appears on screen. Milo Munshin of Sag Harbor, who appeared on the 2022 Amazon Prime reality show Forever Summer: Hamptons, remembers the difficulty of filming at certain sites. Permits to film at the beach, for example, can be expensive and hard to acquire, causing difficulty for shows without an HBO-size budget. Munshin also remembers the crew being turned away from certain locations, including Nick and Toni’s, the celebrity-saturated Italian spot that The New York Times once hailed as the most “hallowed name among East End restaurants.”
“Certain restaurants probably don’t want to be associated with reality TV if it’s a really nice, sort of upscale restaurant,” Munshin says. “It’s just the stigma that a lot of places don’t want to take part in.”
Other hospitality businesses are finding ways to build their clientele through reality-TV exposure. While Erdem’s 75 Main has embraced synonymity with Serving the Hamptons, Topping Rose House, the very tony Bridgehampton hotel and restaurant, uses its reality TV appearances as a strategic publicity boost — without allowing the exposure to completely define its image. The hotel was first featured on Summer House in 2018 as the venue for a garden rosé party, and has also appeared in various episodes of The Real Housewives of New York City. Those cameos turned out to be excellent branding opportunities, especially for reaching audiences outside of the New York sphere of influence. The hotel had opened just a few years before, and according to its managing director, Joseph Montag, the appearances helped build the hotel’s reputation into what it is today: high-end but less stuffy; an establishment that hosts both “C.E.O.s and the grandkids of C.E.O.s.”
According to Montag, tourists still excitedly attempt to re-enact scenes from their favorite episodes, including one from Real Housewives that involves stealing a can of coconut milk from the kitchen’s pantry. These shenanigans are a small price to pay for the reach and image aura that the hotel has managed to secure through the exposure. “There are some negatives here and there,” acknowledges Montag, “but the positives far outweigh the negatives.”
“How many eyeballs are on an advertisement in Vanity Fair versus how many eyeballs are on just a scene of Summer House?” asks Montag. “We’ve gone with the scene of Summer House.”
Even as zoning and filming restrictions — and good old south-of-the-highway snobbery — hold strong, television projects continue to shoot. Erdem’s show is filming a new season this year after a brief hiatus. Last summer, an A.I. startup launched a reality show on the Twitch network that brings ambitious college-age interns into a Hamptons house to competein the tech-themed version of a competition show.
At this point, locals have grown very accustomed to seeing their hometowns represented on screen, often in ridiculous ways — but, as Munshin concedes, knowing that a show was filmed in his neighborhood still holds some allure. “It’s kind of annoying,” he says, “but also, I will watch it.”