I’ve been taking care of kids for money on and off for over a decade, and if there’s one word I wouldn’t apply to the gig, it’s “glamorous.” Sure, I’ve spent summers nannying in some swell Brooklyn brownstones, but it’s hard to be too intimidated by excess wealth when you’re mostly spending your days bandaging boo-boos and dispensing boxed seaweed on the playground for $20 an hour.
But as Hulu’s Million Dollar Nannies vividly illustrates, not all childcare experiences are created equal. On the series, eight highly experienced nannies band together to form a very 2026 version of The Baby-Sitters Club in…Ibiza, catering primarily to “VIP families” and doing their best not to let their (fairly mild) personal scandals damage their professional relationships.
Million Dollar Nannies is produced by the showrunner behind The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which should be evident from the intensely scored shots of slickly ponytailed, uniformed nannies pushing strollers in perfectly straight lines…but honestly, the drama of the series doesn’t quite live up to its promise, focusing primarily on agency leader and former Kardashian nanny Leah Barrs’s admission that she once hooked up with a dad whose child she babysat for. (Sure, it might sound juicy and Desperate Housewives-adjacent, but the truth eventually comes out that the dad in question was actually a single friend whose nanny Barrs filled in for…once. That said, she still gets fired and slut-shamed by a particularly nutso family for it!)
Why, then, did I watch the entirety of Season 1 in a day when I came down with a 24-hour stomach bug this week? While I’d like to blame Zofran and exhaustion, I think there’s also just something fascinating about seeing childcare, a profession often relegated to the sidelines, placed front and center.
Of course, Million Dollar Nannies doesn’t exactly reflect reality. Though women of color make up at least 40% of the national childcare workforce, the show’s cast features just one Black nanny among its ranks; and most of the people caring for kids in the US aren’t rubbing elbows with celebrities or jetting off to Paris at a moment’s notice—in fact, they’re far more likely to be making less than the minimum wage. There also isn’t that much actual, uh, childcare portrayed on Million Dollar Nannies, hopefully because the parents featured are smart enough to negotiate minimal on-camera time for their kids. Still, it’s interesting to see people navigating the complicated ethics and unspoken rules of nannying on reality TV—such as when newbie Taylor goes rogue and leaves the two little girls in her care with another agency sitter while she confronts her manny boyfriend Mitchell on the beach about issues in their relationship. (Needless to say, her client Nicola—a single mom—goes berserk when she finds out about this.)
