When I was pregnant, I remember, I spent hours poring over child-rearing books to help me figure out my parenting style. Permissive? Authoritarian? Authoritative? (Turns out this was a trick question — according to these books, the correct answer is always authoritative; the other styles end with your daughter vaping in the back of a Cybertruck.)
I read about helicopter parents, the gardener/sculptor debate, the fact that Inuit moms and dads avoid raising their voices at all cost. I learned a lot about parenting choices, which is why I can’t believe it took until “Million Dollar Nannies” to realize that one choice is to be the kind of parent who, upon hiring a nanny, insists that the nanny must “sing lullabies with appropriate tone, cadence, gesticulations and respect for cultural nuance,” and the kind of parent who keeps a straight face when demanding, “Name three luxury brands who do strollers.”
“Chanel?” a desperate job seeker guesses, a bead of sweat pulsing on her forehead in the luxury Ibiza sun.
“No. That is wrong.”
I have no particular talent in determining what kind of television shows are going to be popular before they’re released, but what I can tell you is that I watched all eight episodes of “Million Dollar Nannies” in a row, and that if this also happened to you, you have come to the correct place.
The unscripted show, premiering on Freeform on Wednesday and also airing on Hulu, is about the aspirations of Leah Barrs, a bleached Californian who once launched herself directly into the sun — the Kardashian child care ecosystem — and who has now come to Europe with nothing but a Rolodex and a vague plan to open a new agency serving the rich and vacationing.
“We’re not babysitters!” she repeatedly insists in the tone of voice Joan Crawford might have used to ban wire hangers. “We’re elite travel nannies.”
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“We” is Leah herself, plus seven other childminders whom she has lured from America with the promise of living that 1 percent life, or at least wiping the butts of it.
There’s Sydney and Tamaya from Arizona, Hannah from New York, and Olivia from some dank ring of social media hell called NannyTok. There are mannies Jack and Mitchell, the latter of whom insists on bringing his fellow-nanny girlfriend, Taylor, a shiny Barbie doll with stalker eyes. And just when you think, Don’t write that, Monica, readers will say it’s misogynistic, Taylor is sobbing on a beach and declaring that a client she has known for one week is the mom she never had. Sometimes the eyes don’t lie.
Off duty, the nannies get blitzed, develop feuds and wear traffic cones on their heads.
And what of the clients? Ha ha. Hahaha. They let just anybody have kids, don’t they?
A tiny blond millionaire insists that her nannies “cultivate independence from the patriarchy and any male-dominated hierarchy.” Another mom is obsessed with her minor children’s DJ careers. I think it says something that the most normal parents are a trio of gay men who all insist on being known as Daddy [Firstname], who have each had plastic surgery to make them look like each other, and who insist in their employment contract that nannies offer “personal assistance with grooming and spray tanning as reasonably requested.”
At this point, you think a lot about what went into that sentence. Did Daddy Tom suggest thrice-weekly manscaping from his children’s caretaker, at which point Daddy Moke placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and said, “Come now, Daddy, let’s keep the requests reasonable.”
The show’s primary villains are a family whom the nannies deem the G’s — a dad, mom and mother-in-law who behave as if they sit around all day dreaming up ways to be strange. Their nannies must use chopsticks to plate and arrange the children’s food because, of course, a poor person dispensing a Cheez-It with her bare hands is disgusting. Their nannies must swim in wetsuits, only buy white sneakers, and the female nannies whom Señora G. deems attractive must wear extra-baggy white scrubs, an arrangement that somehow manages to make every person receiving every scrub size feel bad about herself.
You haven’t lived, and I say this with sincerity, until you’ve watched one grown woman sit another grown woman down on a sofa that costs more than your mortgage and imperiously critique her performance of “Baby Shark.”
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What we learn from the G’s, and from this show in general, is that parenting might be the only arena left in polite society in which deranged behavior is not only accepted but also celebrated. In grown-up-centered employment, there are reasonable requests, and then there are requests that will get you immediately reported to HR. But in the world of nannying, extreme demands are presented only as evidence that you love your children. That they deserve the best, and that your version of the best involves inanities that other parents are too uncreative to even dream of, or too short on cash to be able to execute, or maybe they just involve buying your nanny a Disney princess costume and forcing her to wear it in the pool.
“Think about it from the mom’s perspective,” the elite travel nannies regularly encourage one another. Think about how it must feel to entrust your most precious possessions to a 22-year-old stranger while you tootle solo around an island that looks as though it were hallucinated by AI.
Here is where I confess that my response was, it must feel freaking fantastic. Those 22-year-olds look like they have so much stamina. Have at it, elite travel nannies.
But also, because these nannies are only on duty for the duration of a vacation — the show is coy on timelines, but employment seems to range between a few days and a few months — maybe it makes sense for parents to set expectations far stricter than the ones they hold themselves to on a daily basis. Do we think the tiny millionaire forces herself to constantly make exercise look “suspiciously entertaining” for her two daughters, or is this demented challenge reserved for the nanny?
Or, as a friend once told me as we pondered our own middle-class date nights: “Of course I don’t allow babysitters to put on movies. If someone gets to veg on the sofa for two hours with my kids, it’s going to be me.”
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Reality television has long been preoccupied with the upstairs/downstairs relationship between the uber-wealthy and the servant class. The “Below Deck” franchise comes to mind as a successful example: We peer into the lives of charter yacht guests, through the eyes of the stewards who wake at dawn to whip up their paradise.
But whether “Million Dollar Nannies” realizes it or not, this show actually has a larger scope. It’s an exploration of the nuclear family: what works, what doesn’t. What it means to have a village, and what it looks like if the village is paid (on that topic, no, we don’t know how much cash the nannies are making per gig, and, yes, we do wonder why, if these families are truly part of the 1 percent, they haven’t schlepped along their own full-time staff).
In one episode, a mom who has heretofore seemed relatively normal has a meltdown because nanny Olivia has allowed her little girl to rummage through Olivia’s bag and try on some nail polish. The mom isn’t opposed to the makeup, she explains — she’s opposed to the fact that Olivia stole a maternal “moment” that she’d wanted to have for herself.
“I didn’t know it was a moment,” Olivia keeps repeating, explaining that she’s between a rock and a hard place: She has been hired to bond with a child. It’s her job. It’s what makes her good at her job. So, does the mom want a nanny whom her child trusts and feels happy with? Or does the mom want a nanny who frostily holds her daughter at arm’s length to ensure the nanny doesn’t steal any moments? Because the two are mutually exclusive.
The astronomical wealth is a foil. What we’re really watching is a meditation on parental anxiety. On what it looks like to think you have enough money to engineer your child’s relationships and outcomes. On what it looks like to realize you don’t, and you can’t.
Let us end with the G’s. Those silly, silly people and their weird, neurotic standards. The jealousy of Señora, dressing her female nannies like rolls of Charmin to make sure that none of them catch the eye of her husband, who, it seems apparent to the viewer, is completely uninterested. It took the G’s a while to have a baby, we learn. Endless rounds of IVF, losses, false starts, trauma.
And it takes a while — most of the eight-episode season — for Señora to find a nanny she trusts, but eventually that happens, too. The nanny is invited on vacation. Or, I guess, a vacation from vacation, because they’re already in Ibiza.
The nanny arrives at the vacation apartment. There are flowers waiting there for her. And a card bearing an inscription that we now realize might also be the flaming sign swinging over the gates of hell: “Welcome to the family.”
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