After years of Below Deck sitting at the fringes of my consciousness, I finally caved last month to the relentless suggestions of the Netflix algorithm and have now watched several seasons across three iterations of the franchise. It’s more fascinating and troubling than I’d realized. For those of you who’ve been stronger in fighting the algorithm than me, here are the basics.
Each season takes place on a superyacht that uber-wealthy clients charter for two-day trips, during “charter season,” a period when a yacht’s owners don’t use the boat themselves but make it available for others to rent. Below Deck’s charter season seems to be about 6 weeks or so, shorter than the traditional charter season, and a slew of clients roll through. A typical charter begins with the guests coming onboard to be welcomed by the crew in their most formal outfits, complete with epaulets; the yacht sets sail to a few key locations in the region; guests eat a lot, enjoy excursions and water sports (jet skis, a slide off the side of the yacht, and so on), and drink a ton, all before returning to dock within 48 hours. Most of the guests aren’t famous, although the Tuohys (the family who, it now turns out, never adopted Michael Oher) make an appearance. But as the title suggests, the guests aren’t really why we’re watching, which is probably why none of them are household names. Instead, the crew, assembled by Bravo’s producers for each season, and their shenanigans are the draw.
What stands out immediately is how intensely hierarchical a world this is. Now that I watch a lot of kdramas, I’m frequently struck by the idea implicit in the translation guidelines that translators must be given as well as stated explicitly elsewhere that English/English-language cultures don’t encode hierarchy within language, a laughable assumption if, like me, you grew up in the US South and in one of the very many “uncle/aunty” cultures that exist in the world and in a military household in one of the most heavily military metro areas in the world.
Below Deck’s hierarchy is intense, and it shows up in behavior, in language, in visual symbols. The very reason the crew are there is to meet guests’ every need. At nearly $150k-$300k a week to charter these boats, every whim gets met, whether or not it was explained in the questionnaire guests fill out ahead of time stating what they want to do and what they want to eat. The captain is the most senior crew member, and then there are a collection of deckhands and an interior crew in charge of all aspects of service.
Across the seasons, the situation among the deckhands varies: sometimes they work under a first mate, sometimes under a boatswain (or bosun), sometimes under a lead deckhand. Promotion happens, but the criteria are vague. And there are some stock deckhand storylines: a young, reasonably attractive man with no experience is usually cast, he immediately becomes a liability because he can’t be trusted with lines when they’re docking or with the anchor, and he either eventually flourishes or is sent home. Most seasons have a single woman deckhand, and either the other deckhands downplay her experiences on other watercraft or she shifts relatively seamlessly into being one of the guys until she’s asked to chip in, find a skirt, and serve dinner with the interior crew. And whether it’s a first mate, a bosun, or a lead deckhand, whoever is in charge often struggles to lead.
I think we’re supposed to watch this for the crew-guest interactions, or to gawk at how terribly behaved rich people are, or for the inevitable car crash romances between crew members, which often explode during nights out on shore so that everyone has to tiptoe around the fallout on the next charter. But it’s the relationship between the interior team that I think most warrants our attention.
The service team are called “stews,” an ungendered term they use to distract from the highly gendered work of the stewardesses. These are always a team of three, and across the several seasons I’ve watched, only one man has been a stew. There’s the chief stew, the second stew, and the third stew. The third stew has the least experience and does the least desirable grunt work. The second stew has more experience, often on other smaller yachts.
And then there’s the chief stew, one of the most fascinating work positions out there in reality TV. The chief stew is a deceptively senior position. I didn’t notice it until someone pointed it out on Twitter, but often the chief stew is the second highest ranked person on the boat, below the captain. And if you aren’t paying attention to the number of bars on people’s epaulets, there are other ways her seniority is signaled. Each season starts with the chief stew walking onto the boat to meet the captain, who is already on board. From there the rest of the crew piles on. The seasons end with the chief stew the last person to leave, with the captain staying on board. There are some seasons where other crew members are equal in rank: some of the chefs have three bars, as do some of the first mates, but nobody outranks the chief stew other than the captain. And in a world where the deckhands and other stews are mostly in their mid-20s, the chief stew stands out for being a woman in her early-to-mid 30s.
And yet this seniority is often hard to spot in the way that seniority within care work is often hard to spot. While the deckhands are tying knots, ferrying passengers back and forth on the smaller boat that gets launched from the yacht, and getting occasional driving lessons from the captain, the chief stew is waitressing and serving as manager of what is effectively a restaurant, making beds, organizing parties, bartending, and ordering supplies. It’s a lot of invisible work, made somewhat more visible by the cameras, but not totally. There are seasons where, in the middle of a heated fight, a chief stew has to remind a first mate or bosun that she outranks him.
There are stock conflicts on Below Deck, but usually they have some variety. Sometimes the chief stew and chef sleep with each other, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the insecure men around the lone woman deckhand become especially fragile, sometimes they aren’t so insecure. The one constant, though, is the battle among the stews, which nearly always turns into the following: the chief stew and the second stew begin the season commiserating because the third stew is so hopeless, and at some point the second stew and the third stew band together because they don’t believe the chief stew is doing enough work. Her work is invisible even to them.
Watching this same thing play out season after season, I wondered why this was. Why does this specific relationship between these three women play out in exactly this way each season? (The one time the second stew didn’t pivot to the third stew, the second stew was a man.) And ultimately I think it gets back to the boat’s overall hierarchy. For the interior team, their route to promotion leads to chief stew, and once they reach it, their prize as they see it is freedom from some of the worst (because it’s so intimate) work. They no longer have to do the laundry for every single person onboard, crew and guest alike. They no longer have to make all the beds and clean up the used condoms left lying on a table. Although they do have important responsibilities that the other stews do not, for them it is really about having reached a level on board where they do not have to chip in when it comes to the grunt work.
At first that seems childish, since the bosun, seemingly her counterpart, is always chipping in with the grunt work on deck. But here’s where the hierarchy bites the most: the deckhands’ ultimate promotion is not to bosun or first mate, it’s to captain. When the deckhands learn to tie knots, throw lines, man the smaller craft, and drive the boat, they’re picking up the skills to become a captain down the road, a line of work they can do well into their 60s. The chief stew in her mid-30s can go no higher. She cannot captain a boat. The most power she can command is removing herself from making every guest’s bed and reminding the men around her on a night off that she outranks them.
The appeal of working on a yacht seems similar to the appeal of working at a summer camp. The clients’ getaway is also the crew’s getaway, no matter how hard they’re working. From personal experience (of camp, not yachts), this appeals to a certain type of person, someone who seeks out a kind of work that is a sanctioned form of running away. I imagine yacht work also appeals deeply to people who want to travel (another sanctioned form of running away, at least given the lengths of time we’re talking about here) but cannot afford to do so, and, for American reality TV, albeit a show with crew members from all over the world, there is a surprising amount of class conflict. Unsurprisingly, the most aggressive fight about class I’ve seen so far came from two Brits, Julia, a second stew from Leeds and the yacht’s chef, Ben, though it’s largely impenetrable because both of their understandings of class are warped in that way that British discussions about class often are. Julia argues from a class position that seems to be her father’s, and maybe not exactly hers. And Ben seems to think that, by “creating a life for himself” by cooking on yachts since his father hasn’t passed down a trust fund, he has escaped his class privilege, the kind so high that he volunteered the information that he “used to play sports” with Princes William and Harry.
If another appeal of summer camp is that you age out of it, on Below Deck only the stews are aged out of yachting. They are on a path that is temporarily lucrative but with no longterm future. Of the seasons I’ve watched, there have been four captains, and only one is a woman. It doesn’t feel incidental that she’s the only captain of the four to clash significantly with her chief stew. In that sense, despite how much money they’re making, the chief stews are, career-wise, trapped, and that unspoken frustration is the bitter note that runs through the entire franchise.
On a side note: while it is technically true that crew members come from all over the world, I should be more precise. Crew members come from Britain and its former settler colonies, a dynamic that you can’t unsee once you spot it.