REVIEW: Byron Baes is not the vibe

Netflix has unleashed its latest monstrosity on the world: a reality TV show set in Byron Bay following an insular group of micro-celebrities and influencers attempting to make it big. The show glamorizes their lavish lifestyles, from wild parties to fashion shows. While the series is a cringe fest from start to finish, the real issues lie in its lack of local voices.

Before I get into my main gripes, I should discuss the cast of nobodies. The first episode establishes our core group of influencers, with the heart of the show and the audience surrogate being Sarah. Sarah St. James is moving to Byron to connect with the burgeoning talent in the area, make friends, suck face and jumpstart her music career. There, she meets Alex Reid, director of an influencer agency (whatever that means), and is introduced to a whole new world of fish faced celebrities.

Alongside this, we follow Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise hack Nathan Favro as he takes us on a guided tour of his incredibly tight knit and incestuous circle of friends. We catch up on the drama that had previously occurred between fashion designers Hannah Brauer and Jessica ‘Jess’ Johansen-Bell; we visit his pretentious friend Cai’s place, and we get an insight into his home life with roommate Elle Watson, who holds a slight possessiveness over our boy Nathan.

While all this is going on, Jade Kevin Foster, who claims to be the “most followed male Instagrammer in Australia”, arrives in town and makes friends with Jess and her sister. This all leads to the episode’s climax, which takes place at an embarrassing party at Hannah’s house where everyone wears all white and strikes meditative poses as a “sound healing” session takes place to eliminate any negative “vibes”.

“Vibes” often seems to be the only word in these people’s vocabularies -, if you took a shot every time you heard it, you’d be dead before the credits roll. This show has given “vibes” a whole new meaning, with it now seeming like some abstract force holding the entirety of Byron together; a luminiferous ether that is invisibly tethered through the land.

Visiting the Crystal Palace in the second episode, Jade and Hannah sit in a dragon egg, where the latter posits that the strange force that surrounds them is what the word “vibes” was invented to describe. Hannah also tells us earlier that the mountains are filled with crystals, and that Byron is a very strange place that either lets you in or spits you out.

This bizarre  spatiality seems to extend itself to the interactions between our characters. People are constantly separated by their phone screens, and there is a fake plasticity that undercuts interactions between everyone. When the characters discuss their pasts, instead of cutting to video footage or old photographs of the events being referred to, images of peoples’ Instagrams will pop up along with the photo’s captions. These ‘snapshots’ barely register as a proper moment in time, merely curated temporal freeze-frames. These people are without authentic identities or pasts.

The only authentic people seem to be Sarah and Alex, who cut through all the influencer bullshit and serve as the real heart of the show. Sarah genuinely searches for meaningful connections amongst the detritus. Meanwhile, Alex makes snide remarks and knowing winks to the audience that a lot of what these people are doing is cringeworthy – whether it be describing the “sound healing” as cult-like, or mocking Jess’s uninspired fashion show.

Space is also made strange in the locations the characters meet up at. If they aren’t at each other’s houses or self-run businesses, they are in open fields or long expansive beaches with no other humans in sight. They never visit any of the local eateries, shops or bars.

This is most likely a result of the fact that the locals protested the filming of the show in their area, calling it a misrepresentation of their community. As a result, the show resorts to non-descript locations and sticks closely to their large, pearly-white mansions. What this does, however, is draw closer attention to the off-kilter atmosphere of the show and its lack of humanity..

Additionally, the editing is extremely janky, intercutting between multiple angles every five seconds. The music, as well, is overbearing and extremely grating, as if they just wrote down a list of whatever songs were playing on Nova 96.9 that day.
Byron Baes is an incredibly mind-numbing show, specifically made so we can  gawk and laugh at these influencers as they are brought out to dance for our amusement. The lack of community support for the program emphasizes how fake and inauthentic the whole affair is, and the strange spatiality only adds to this ersatz reality. Byron Bay, for this show, is a series of signifiers: beaches, lighthouse, hippies, crystals, etc. The Byron Bay of this show does not exist.