‘Selling Sunset’: How Is “Sociopath” “Voldemort” Christine Quinn Written Out of Season 6?

Selling Sunset is back with a brand new season — but not every realtor is back in the cast. In fact, Season 6 marks the first major cast shakeup in the show’s history with the departure of four agents: Maya Vander, Vanessa Villela, Davina Potratz (well, she’s in a part of Season 6, when she’s not at Burning Man), and Christine Quinn.

No shade to the other former Oppenheim Group realtors, but it’s that last departure that’s really felt this time around. In the show’s first five seasons, glam/goth bombshell and dramatic diva extraordinaire Christine Quinn became the most talked-about member of the cast. And, thanks to a masterful ability to stir up the exact right kind of drama that propels these kinds of reality shows, Christine also got arguably the most screen time of anyone on the show. And when Quinn wasn’t serving a highly impractical but gorgeous look on screen, everyone else was talking about her, her stunts, and her shenanigans. What does a season without Christine Quinn even look like?

Before Selling Sunset can answer that question, the show has to deal with the sudden exit of its MVP — Most Villainous Person. There were a lot of signs that Christine’s time was up in the Season 5 finale, like that incredibly extra shot of her dramatically looking out over her balcony, but we did not know for sure that she was leaving yet. The opening of Season 6 makes it very clear: Christine Quinn is no longer part of the Selling Sunset narrative.

All of this is established very succinctly in the recap that plays at the start of the Season 6 premiere. We see Christine’s two biggest mistakes from last season: insinuating that Chrishell Stause was sleeping with Jason Oppenheim to get real estate listings, and the allegation that Christine bribed a client to stop working with Emma Hernan, her co-worker. We get a scene of Jason telling all of the other realtors that if Christine continues with the drama, “she’s gone” and Mary Fitzgerald asking, “Is this the end of Christine?” Then, in a soundbite taken from the Season 5 reunion that Christine skipped because she had COVID (or lied about having COVID), Jason says, “There’s not a place for her at the Oppenheim Group.”

And that’s that.

Just to hammer that point home, Mary’s intro line during the realtor roll call that opens up Season 6 is, “I don’t think I’ll really miss Christine, so it’s probably for the best that she’s gone.”

Even though Christine is gone doesn’t mean the cast has forgotten about her. How could you forget a woman who booked a zebra for her engagement party? This results in a few offhand mentions of Christine — and they aren’t exactly flattering. In Episode 3, Amanza Smith brings up Christine while she and Heather Rae El Moussa are looking at Chelsea Lazkani’s $22 million listing in Manhattan Beach. The transition is clunky as hell, but the sentiment is clear: “Speaking of surprises… how much do we love that Christine’s not back?”

The women laugh at this, even if Chelsea — Christine’s last-friend-standing at Oppenheim — does not agree. “We had our own little camaraderie and our own vibe,” says Chelsea. “I’m really sad about it.”

Heather chimes in, saying, “You can still have a relationship with her but I think, just for happiness and breath of fresh air, we go into the office now, and there’s not this —”

“Tension,” says Amanza, finishing Heather’s sentence. Then Heather takes all of this a step further and jokingly says that maybe they should give Christine a nickname, like She Who Must Not Be Named. Chelsea ain’t touching that one.

In her confessional, Chelsea adds that newcomer Bre Tiesi has big shoes to fill and wishes her luck with a heaping helping of sarcasm.

Christine’s name comes up again in Episode 4 at Heather’s birthday dinner during a conversation about the fight that Chrishell (present) and Nicole Young (not present) recently had. Heather says that she’s heard Nicole’s side of the story, and that when Nicole talks about it, she’s “very convincing that she did nothing wrong, that you just started calling her a ‘fucking bitch.” That’s when Emma chimes in with an observation that’s more like an allegation:

The conversation pivots away from that rather quickly. If you’ve seen all of Season 6, you probably know why no one at the table (or in the Selling Sunset editing bay) wanted to cram in a few more jokes about how Nicole and/or Christine may or may not be sociopaths. That’s the kind of allegation that one might book a quickie psychiatrist appointment and consult a lawyer over, if they were a new cast member on Selling Sunset. Anyway — the point is, Decider dot com in no way alleges or agrees with the claim that Christine Quinn or Nicole Young are sociopaths.

It’s not like the realtors really held back around Christine when she was on the show, but these exchanges hit a little harder when Christine’s not around to defend herself and make her own baseless claims about her coworkers’ characters. Christine was such an integral part of every scene and every conversation in previous seasons that it actually feels weird for everyone to go whole episodes without mentioning her. It really does feel like Christine has ascended to a different plane of existence where she is She Who Must Not Be Named, a bleached-blonde specter looming over Sunset Boulevard.

All of Selling Sunset Season 6 is now available to stream on Netflix.