LOS ANGELES — Ryan Serhant doesn't know selling real estate without a television show.

After a short-lived career as an actor, and just months into his foray in real estate, he was cast in Bravo's reality series "Million Dollar Listing New York," a spinoff of its L.A.-based predecessor. The series gave viewers tours inside multimillion-dollar luxury properties while showing the drama among arrogant and wily agents who often competed for listings or sales. It premiered in 2012 and ran for nine seasons — and it helped establish a winning format of high-end real estate voyeurism mashed up with reality TV drama.

From the start, Serhant sought to stand out with an over-the-top, hot-shot salesman style — dressing like Aslan, the lion from "The Chronicles of Narnia," and jumping into a swimming pool during an open house were among his exploits. Ever the dealmaker, he brokered a number of specials and spinoffs for Bravo, most recently "Ryan's Renovation" (2021), which chronicled the remodel of the Brooklyn townhouse he shares with his wife and daughter.

In 2020, he started his own real estate brokerage — Serhant. — and once again invited cameras along, but this time for Netflix, which has doubled down on real-estate reality programming with such shows as "Selling Sunset" and "Buying Beverly Hills." With "Owning Manhattan," now streaming, cameras follow Serhant and his team of agents as they compete — sometimes with each other — for some of New York's most sought-after listings.

In a recent video call from New York — as a back-seat passenger readying for his next appointment — Serhant talked about making the jump to Netflix from Bravo, navigating reality TV drama as a boss and why money-strapped viewers can't get enough luxury real estate porn. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q: You have a long history with Bravo. You approached them with the idea of a show when you started your company. What was the feedback and what prompted the jump to Netflix?

A: When I knew that I was starting my own company, I had a conversation with Bravo and my agents, and they were basically like, "You know how 'Million Dollar Listing' is a format? It follows a couple real estate agents as they sell real estate. Imagine 'Law & Order' — that's a format. Imagine, if you turned on an episode of 'Law & Order' and then all of a sudden one of the detectives was like, 'J.K., now I have my own detective agency and that's what the show is.'" It would be weird for the format. And so we brought the show to an end after they tracked my starting of Serhant., and I immediately put together a presentation of what my next chapter would look like ... and presented that to all of the networks. Got offers for most of them. But I know Jenn [Levy] really well at Netflix. [Levy, who had been director of unscripted originals at Bravo, left her post at Netflix earlier this year.]

We went forward with Netflix, and it's honestly been such a cool experience. It scratches the itch of, "OK, you want to see $250 million New York City penthouses? Here you go, Episode 1. You want to see what it's like inside the workplace drama of a young startup real estate firm, a la 'Vanderpump Rules'? OK, here you go. You want to have your own orchestra composing your music that gives you slightly a 'Succession' vibe. Yeah, we could do that too. Plus we're gonna drop drones through the canyons of this city and showcase Manhattan in a way it's never been shown before. Yeah, we can do that because we're Netflix. What else do you want to do?" I was like, "I've never seen a reality TV show that has a first-person narrator with a voice-over, can I do that?" And they were like, "Yeah."

Q: You have a background in acting, and you've been in the reality space for a while, so you know drama makes good TV. But you take your role as a professional starting a company seriously. How is it to navigate the drama now as a boss?

A: So stressful. It was a tough one. "Million Dollar Listing" was stressful at the time, but it was really all me. It was on my shoulders, my clients, my business. This time around, I bet my life on starting this business in 2020, and so the exposure is a double-edged sword. With Netflix, part of the deal was, "Here's the amount of time you're gonna film for, and we're gonna film everything, for better and for worse, and we'll see what happens." That removes some deal pressure. On "Million Dollar Listing," it was formatted. So you're gonna list it, and you would have those 12 listings up on a board for a year, and if they sell, they sell; they don't sell, you get fired on TV. Because of the shooting window, you couldn't leave things open-ended. This is different. This season ends on the cliffhanger. Every episode is a cliffhanger. We had an agent, halfway through the season, just up and quit on camera. I had to fire people who are pushing other people to quit. That's what you get to watch on top of the deals now. The show starts with me and 12 agents, and it ends with 10. I start with salt-and-pepper hair, I end with white hair.

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