Why eat-the-rich infiltration thrillers are everywhere
The call is coming from inside the house.
The house is yours. It’s a four-story London townhouse complete with pool, sauna and wine cellar. The caller is your nanny/manny/son’s girlfriend. They’re not like you. They’re from the wrong side of the tracks.
They’re calling to say they see your lavish lifestyle: the yacht, the Spanish villa, the sleek car crunching up the gravel driveway; they see it all, and they’re angry. They’re livid. They’ve been plotting for years, figuring out how to worm their way into your life, to become welcomed, trusted, one of the family. Then they’re going to unleash their devilish plan that involves destroying your career and dismantling all your fineries before finally killing some combination of you, the dog and your husband.
But why?
Why are they so angry, and why is this being played out in a recent cluster of wildly popular class-divide-revenge TV shows? Just look around [contains spoilers]:
Amazon Prime’s The Girlfriend is a classic tale of boy meets girl, except the boy’s wealthy gallery owner mother (Robin Wright) discovers that her son’s girlfriend – whose parents are a butcher and builder – once put offal in her ex-boyfriend’s wedding cake and really isn’t suitable marriage material at all. The mother is eventually drowned for her trouble.
The Girlfriend: Don’t cry over spilled Margaux
That series was swiftly followed on the same platform by Malice, which has a similar cast of characters (right down to the Black female best friend), plus Jack Whitehall as the mega-rich family’s tutor-slash-psycho-killer. Jack jumps the class divide in pursuit of his prey and this time it’s the venture capitalist head of the household, played by David Duchovny, who meets a sticky end.
Then there’s All Her Fault. Marissa and Peter Irvine are, respectively, a wealth manager and a commodities trader. Cue lots of glossy drone shots of downtown Chicago skyscrapers and suburban gated communities. When their son goes missing, it’s the nanny who dunnit.
And spare a thought for Julianne Moore’s “socialite and raptor conservationist” in Netflix’s dark comedy Sirens, who floats about breathlessly for five episodes but is ultimately usurped by her social-climbing PA.
Sirens: Hydrangea danger
How did we get here? Why are we all binging these shows?
Perhaps the recent spate of series was kick-started by 2023’s Saltburn. Despite receiving mixed reviews, it became one of the most talked-about films of 2024. A collection of viral scenes and a hit soundtrack helped, but the template of infiltrating and destroying the uber-wealthy – this time, the British landed gentry – was established as a gleefully winning formula.
Whether we’re following class warriors Barry Keoghan’s Oliver in Saltburn or Olivia Cooke’s Cherry in The Girlfriend, we become voyeurs not just of the lifestyles of the rich and the famous but – like rubberneckers on the road – of their slow and painful demise. This is no longer the wealth porn of Succession and White Lotus – we’re now in eat the rich territory and it’s the have-nots holding the knife and fork.
Saltburn: Pleased to eat - I mean meet - you
Is it because the rich folk deserve it and we want to see the tables turned? Well sure, sometimes they’re not nice people and justice is served.
But are so many of these shows also being made now because studio heads are tapping into a sense of injustice and impotence in These Tough Economic Times™? The wealth gap has grown steadily wider. In 2010, the total wealth held by the US’s richest 1% was $17 trillion. Fast forward to 2025 and – largely thanks to a rise in the value of their property and shares – that had ballooned to almost $55 trillion. If we put this in individual terms, it’s an increase of $26 million per household. That buys a couple of holiday villas, a small yacht and leaves you with change for a handful of staff.
For most of the people streaming these shows, things also changed in those 15 years. The bottom 50% of US households saw their collective wealth grow significantly from $0.3 to $4.35 trillion. But that’s only an increase of $57,000 per household. Given high levels of debt, low asset ownership, and the soaring costs of everything from healthcare to food to fuel, it amounts to not much more than the cost of a Prime or Netflix subscription.
Malice: No more seats at this table
So the average viewer can never attain the megayachts and mansions, but those who already have them have seen their wealth grow effortlessly. At the same time, people in the 50% bucket are recoiling at the cost of eggs, watering down baby formula and putting off dental, home and car repairs they can’t afford.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that so many people are watching these shows from under their heated blankets (which are considerably cheaper than turning the heating on). We can enjoy the glossy lifestyles from our sofas, and then we can enjoy watching them be destroyed piece by piece, taken down by a hero who – psychotic and murderous tendencies aside – is just so identifiable.
For people on the wrong side of the widening wealth gap, the anger is understandable. But the effect of these shows isn't to incite rebellion but contain it, offering a safe, shiny, fictional release for rage that has nowhere else to go. This catharsis asks nothing of us once the screen goes dark.
