If Shakespeare made an MTV reality show, it would’ve been this one

A breaking alert in my email inbox, from Hollywood trade website Deadline, shook me from my complacency: “Hurricane Milton makes landfall in Siesta Key, FL.” Suddenly, last week’s “storm of the century” had turned personal. While the internet fixated on Caroline Calloway’s fate, my concerns went elsewhere: someone check on BG and my drama queen Juliette!

Odds are those names mean nothing to you. If they do, we should link arms, for we are enlightened inductees in the cult of the most grossly underappreciated reality TV series of the modern era, Siesta Key (2017-2023).

Siesta Key, god-tier reality TV.Credit: MTV

Did you know the back canals of Florida, hours from the cosmopolitan glamour of Miami, homed actual millionaires? Until Siesta Key, I didn’t. It’s like finding out that people live on the Gold Coast by choice. This show had a billionaire, even. And the parties they threw for stupidly-tanned Floridian college kids should be the stuff of TV legend by now.

Siesta Key – which streams in Australia on Paramount+ – followed the drama-filled lives of fresh graduates who spent most of their time in swimsuits, drinking and dating in the beachside idyll of its titular locale. Premiering on MTV in July 2017, it was easy to miss amid a glut of similarly tanned nonsense from Jersey Shore to Floribama Shore to Pauly Shore (probably).

Critics hated it. Upon its debut, the show was immediately rubbished as an empty reimagining of Laguna Beach (MTV’s groundbreaking reality hit, currently celebrating its 20th anniversary), as if an empty reimagining of Laguna Beach isn’t already better than 90 per cent of reality dreck where forced hijinks and bogus confessionals – those to-camera testimonials seen on shows like The Kardashians – remove any pretence towards verisimilitude. On Siesta Key, as on Laguna Beach, the goings-on felt ruthlessly legitimate (to the point of potentially exploitative).

Which is not to say that producers weren’t pulling strings. The show understood when cast members weren’t carrying their dramatic weight and callously shifted attention when warranted, creating endless tension between supposed friends. Earlier seasons, for example, followed gentle Californian transplant Kelsey Owens as she sought to ingratiate herself into the established gang; by the show’s third season, its focus shifted to the more outlandish (and, let’s be honest, psychotically alluring) Juliette Porter, who looked like an angel but was quick to throw a fist or a drink, which she did often. The series morphed into a tally of her relationships with toxic millionaires and the jealous girls trying to claim her turf, which is an excellent basis for any show.

On Siesta Key, no one was immune to the editor’s knife – not even its founding producer’s son. In June 2020, during the wider culture’s post-George Floyd reckoning with its own racist culpability, MTV dumped the show’s egotistical centrepiece, millionaire doofus Alex Kompothecras, after racist posts were uncovered on his Instagram. The show’s third season had already been filmed, meaning he had to be edited out of reaction shots – a leg remaining here, an arm there. Awkwardly, it was Alex’s chiropractor-turned-businessman dad, Gary, who’d initially footed the money for the series’ pilot episode, so enamoured was he of his son’s playful lifestyle. That it ended up destroying his son’s public image forever is the sort of ironic wrinkle that allows me to call Siesta Key “Shakespearean”.

Needing a new moneyed focus, the series landed on Sam Logan, a young billionaire (and scion of a media mogul), but he proved such a charisma vacuum that he was increasingly sidelined by the show’s key players. Imagine being a youthful billionaire, whose lavish access to bacchanalian excess, parties, yachts and fancy homes are central to the show’s existence, and still having people be like, “Ugh, Sam’s around again…” . After being dumped by Juliette, he had a will they-won’t they thing with Jordana Barnes, a buddy for whom he’d once purchased a Brazilian butt lift (his girlfriend was displeased), but the series couldn’t commit to the sham.

There were more break-ups on Siesta Key than in an egg bowl, but the sour ending between Brandon “BG” Gomes, the show’s playboi/aspiring rapper, and Madisson Hausburg, its sweet princess, was a cheating scandal so ugly you wondered how the young cast members were convinced to return. They did, and BG soon hooked up with another friend, Camilla Cattaneo, in a love story the series played out as sultry romance. By the season’s end, there was a bombshell – he’d cheated on her too, and accidentally become a father in the process. Contractually obliged to attend the season’s closing reunion special, he looked a man broken by his folly, as other cast members took shots at his incredible betrayal (a full three years before #Scandoval). Watching at the time, I felt concerned for his mental state, such was the real danger permeating the show’s glossy sheen.

Brandon eventually made good, putting on his big boy pants and becoming a doting co-parent to his baby son Quincy (even if his belief in his own rap career remained wildly deluded). Madisson, meanwhile, had her own scandal when it was revealed she’d started dating an older man, Ish, who’d been an executive producer on Siesta Key’s earliest seasons (a bit like that time on The Office when Pam hooked up with the camera guy, except this was real). The show barely addressed the gross professional breach, instead toying with the May-December angle of their relationship before landing on love; they eventually married and Madisson got pregnant.

The thing with doing a Laguna Beach in the era of Instagram is that fans are always a step ahead of the production. In December 2021, Madisson revealed that she’d suffered a stillbirth, a tragic development it soon became apparent the show was ill-equipped to deal with. The incongruous clash between the real-life heaviness and the show’s soapy facade made for some of the rawest reality TV you’ll ever see, both uncomfortably inappropriate and emotionally compelling at once.

Few reality series pierced the veil of their own machinery with this much discomfiting force. Even Siesta Key’s theme song was god-tier: Carly Rae Jepsen’s Cut to the Feeling. But by season five, with its ratings sinking (despite the series transplanting its cast to Miami), the writing was on the wall. It wrapped abruptly after just a half-season order – not officially cancelled, but indefinitely paused.

In the wake of Hurricane Milton, you’d hope MTV, in all their ruthless vision, saw an opportunity to bring the cameras back to Siesta Key. For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliette and her horrible Romeos and a bunch of fame-chasing adolescents who had no idea what they were in for.

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