A few days before Selling Sunset Season 5 arrived on screens, its creator, Adam DiVello, started to experience some preshow jitters. “With a Netflix premiere, [where all the episodes drop at once,] it feels like it’s just an opening night on Broadway,” he tells Tudum via video call, sitting in front of a wall papered with Selling Sunset cast photos. “There’s no stopping, from the minute it starts, until the very end. It’s just opening night.”

As viewers who devoured the season on opening night know, the new batch of episodes is the most personal yet, exploring the well-reported romance of Oppenheim Group colleagues Jason Oppenheim and Sunset heroine Chrishell Stause. Yet Jason and Chrishell, who have broken up, allegedly due to differing opinions on starting a family, aren’t the only ones revealing new parts of themselves this season. Amanza Smith continues to work through her delicate custody case with her estranged ex, and new cast member Chelsea Lazkani makes a fabulous splash into the proceedings, creating a brand-new dynamic for polarizing queen Christine Quinn.

Once the world has had a couple of days to digest all that drama, the memes will come — fast and furious. DiVello doesn’t consider himself “a big Twitter user,” but the younger people on his staff “share all the good tweets that get posted and all the funny little memes.” That means he’s probably seen your TikTok about the Selling Sunset music — a collaboration with “wonderful” music supervisor Carrie Hughes — which has become an internet genre of its own.

“The more we think about it, the more we laugh; it never stops. That’s all I ever get asked about is the music,” he says, bemused by the development. “But in the edit phase, I always keep comparing it, again, to a musical. Because it feels like these are like musical numbers... where the audience could almost clap as the next scene is coming up. It’s like, ‘Oh, this is so good.’ And now we go into the next one.”

So, after putting on 10 episodes of the most dramatic real estate musicale to ever delight our screen, Selling Sunset maestro DiVello is here to break down his greatest hits (and your biggest questions). 

Do you have a proudest moment from this season? Well, the show got to film in Greece and Italy for a minute. So it was fun. And then, this season pulls back a lot of layers on the “characters.” Last season it was very much focused on the drama between Christine and Emma. This season just broadens it out to include much more of the cast’s stories and really just dive deeper into their personal lives.

We certainly get some new pairings. It’s always fun to see a relationship unfold in a season, like we did with Jason and Chrishell. Ultimately, Jason had a huge decision to make: Do you go for the dream girl because of the moment, or do you wait because of what you believe in? I love the fact that you just leave the season, not knowing where it’s going next season. That, to me — it’s just fun storytelling, right? 

Very! What was it like to document a new romance for two characters you already knew? I think it was probably a little uncomfortable for everybody on our crew, just because we hadn’t seen the two of them kiss before [laughs]. It was definitely a unique situation.

And we knew that there was this big pending decision that Jason was going to have to make. Honest to God, none of us knew which way he was going to go. None of us. So when you see that scene with Emma and Chrishell on the sofa [talking about the breakup in the finale], that’s kind of when we learned about it too. We were just like, “Oh, shit. He really is not doing this.”

They clearly trusted you enough to let you show the breakup. With Chrishell, we had already done it once before when she broke up with Justin [Hartley, her ex-husband]. I think that she had already trusted us, because of how we handled that — we didn’t overexploit it and we didn’t throw anybody under the bus. It was the same with this. They trust that we’re going to tell a good story. I always say to my cast, from Season 1, it’s like, “We’re going to show your life. We’re just going to make it look a little bit more dramatic than it might be in real life.”

Speaking of casting, what do you look for in a new cast member? It has to be someone that has a strong enough personality that can hold their own and really kind of blend in with this mix of people that have known each other for 15, 20 years. And will the rest of the cast accept them?

They have known one another for a very long time. They are a real family; that’s what’s so nice about them. People don’t realize this, but Amanza introduced Jason to Mary. That’s how long they’ve all had this bond connection. It was great finding them; I’m so glad we did. This wasn’t a show where we just cast a bunch of realtors.

What made Chelsea such a great newbie to add to the bunch? Chelsea’s just a no-brainer. I kept saying, “She reminds me of a Naomi Campbell — badass.”

How do you get a Chelsea? We start looking around. We have a team of producers here to do this stuff 24-7. We just start snooping around at different realtors and go on websites. When we came across Chelsea, she actually knew Jason already, because Jason had sold her husband a house. So it was like a great connection. He was totally open to having her join the brokerage, and so it was just a perfect fit.

We liked the fact that she was in Manhattan Beach, so she covers a different part of LA. Not necessarily the Hills, but it was fun to see her break into the Hills market and sell a house up there.

Chelsea is obviously new to the group and figuring out much of the drama — which is heavily influenced by real-life gossip headlines. How do you decide what to talk about and what to leave outside of the frame? If it’s juicy, it’s going to end up in the show. I mean, bottom line, there’s not going to be anything juicy ending up on the floor — at all. 

Are you surprised that some of the best drama comes from the power playing over the desks? The women, from the day we started, were very territorial about where they sat. They had been sitting there for many years, before we even started production. The very first scene that we shot was Jason telling the girls all that Chrishell was coming, and Christine gave up one of her best lines. It was like, “She could sit on the floor until she deserves to get a desk.”

Which desk would you pick? Gosh, I think I’d want to sit up where Jason sits.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.