{"id":564704,"date":"2026-07-02T06:41:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T06:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/564704\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T06:41:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T06:41:11","slug":"the-million-dollar-nannies-love-to-party-theyre-more-mary-poppers-than-mary-poppins-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/564704\/","title":{"rendered":"The Million Dollar Nannies love to party. They\u2019re more Mary Poppers than Mary Poppins \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I believe the children are our future. And what I mean is that I believe the children in Million Dollar Nannies<\/b> (Disney+<\/a>) are our future because their multimillionaire parents can afford apocalypse bunkers.<\/p>\n

Your less-wealthy children? Most will be cinders in the coming conflagration. The rest will be battling it out as savage marauders on the Fury Road. (The columnist looks ruefully at his thuggish nephews, who\u2019ve had an early start with such behaviour.)<\/p>\n

In the meantime, before rogue AI<\/a> and climate change and Peter Thiel<\/a> destroy civilisation, the best way to survive is to be employed as a servant to an oligarch. Then perhaps they will take you with them to their compound in New Zealand, where, please God, you\u2019ll be able to murder them in your sleep and hoard all of their precious water, canned goods and crypto tokens.<\/p>\n

A subtext of Million Dollar Nannies is that being in the employ of the superwealthy is a better option than, say, working in finance, now that the middle class is in collapse. <\/p>\n

One of the mannies on this show \u2013 a manny is a male nanny; see also: manthropologist, manaesthetist, manbulance driver \u2013 gave up a finance job to go to Ibiza, where the head million dollar nanny, Leah, is setting up an agency leasing nannies to the super-rich who are on holiday.<\/p>\n

A proper programme about care work would be fascinating. It\u2019s the most important thing there is. That the western world generally outsources many of its caring responsibilities to relatively vulnerable and unprotected people is fascinating to me. If children truly were, as Leah says in this show, rich people\u2019s \u201cmost precious asset\u201d, the people looking after them would be as well paid and well protected as their accountants and lawyers. <\/p>\n

Caregivers in general deserve better. The notion that the care and nurture of children require less remuneration than the care and nurture of money is mad to me. (I mean, I don\u2019t have kids, so what do I know? Maybe, on an ongoing basis, children are just that annoying.)<\/p>\n

The nannies here are not particularly protected. Even on this show, where the nannies in question are more privileged than most, there\u2019s a disturbing side discussion about the consequence-free sexual harassment some of them have experienced from male employers. <\/p>\n

That reality shows such as this one have pivoted from \u201cHey, you already have a good life thanks to social democracy, so here\u2019s a fridge\u201d to \u201cHey, maybe you could be rich to protect you from the storm\u201d to \u201cHey, you could work for the rich \u2013 maybe that will save you\u201d probably shows at what point in the inequality cycle we\u2019re landing.<\/p>\n

All of the nannies Leah sources are very glamorous, because she has largely sourced them from something called #nannytok<\/a>, an online world in which fashionable young carers boast about the private jets, mansions and yachts of their employers. In the credits we see eight of them marching towards the camera, a phalanx of straight-backed, glossy-haired superfolk pushing strollers like a manifestly destined babycare army.<\/p>\n

At the outset Leah explains that the very rich people they\u2019ll be working for are really, really concerned about their privacy and that confidentiality is very important to them. Then the camera crews turn up at the very rich people\u2019s homes and film their children at length.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an interesting cross-section of the unreasonably wealthy. One hereditarily rich woman who wants to hire some of the nannies complains about them showing cleavage and frets about them trying to attract her husband. The dads who want to hire a manny for their twins have the two prospective employees race in their pool, to see who can swim faster.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure how all this stacks up against European employment law, but both issues also came up during my own Irish Times interview. \u201cHe seems quite qualified, but I fear he cannot swim and may steal my man,\u201d one editor said at the time.<\/p>\n

You might think that the privacy-shy millionaires of Ibiza would be able to afford Mary Poppins \u2013 style professionals who float down on umbrellas and are filled with family-healing wisdom and live and breathe their jobs. Not so. The nannies and mannies they hire party hard on their time off. They spend a lot of their free hours clubbing and drinking and jumping into swimming pools while yelling. They\u2019re more Mary Poppers than Mary Poppins (that is surely already someone\u2019s drag name), and Leah, who styled herself initially as the disciplinarian of the group, could be the worst of all.<\/p>\n

Before long she is running around the villa in her underwear shouting \u201cwoo-hoo!\u201d, and while this is also the management style of the editor of The Irish Times, I suspect that it doesn\u2019t go down as well in childcare as it does in journalism.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, as a messy bitch who loves drama myself, I feel a bit sorry for Leah and the way that all her ungrateful hunky underlings (hunkerlings?) begin gossiping about her outre behaviour almost instantly. They do so seemingly confident that the film crews who record everything they do aren\u2019t going to betray them by putting it all on television. <\/p>\n

All this is coupled with drone overviews of Ibiza (good location shots for the post-collapse commune period when we\u2019re requisitioning private property, to be honest), generic happy house music with the generic live-for-the-moment sentiments of a psychopathic culture, conversations about conversations about previous conversations, and plenty of flashbacks to earlier in the same episode (in black-and-white, of course, because earlier in the show is, technically, \u201cthe past\u201d, and \u201cthe past\u201d is always in black-and-white).<\/p>\n

The children, of course, are just children and don\u2019t deserve any of this. They should be able to leave this insanity behind and escape into anonymity and therapy as they get older. But here they are mere props for the grotesqueries perpetrated by their adult caregivers both genetic and contracted, who bicker and plot and feud and flirt and give each other spray tans and say things like \u201cYou have taken my kindness for weakness!\u201d with the scary expressionless face of true happiness\/surgery\/ennui.<\/p>\n

Million Dollar Nannies is yet more evidence of a world that\u2019s sliding into chaos: inequality (boo!), obscene wealth (yah!), voyeurism (yum!) and mass surveillance (woohoo!). We should really carve the show\u2019s contents on a cave wall before a solar flare wipes all the tapes and the internet breaks. It\u2019s important that we never forget this. <\/p>\n

Then our surviving young relatives can retreat to that cave after raiding the bunkers of the rich in order to eat roasted oligarch, hide from the scorching sun and contemplate the mistakes of their ancestors.<\/p>\n