When This Old House started airing on PBS in 1979, it unknowingly gave birth to a monster. A pretty monster, with open-concept sight lines and teeth like subway tiles, but a monster all the same. The show, which was first hosted by Bob Vila, drew back the curtain on home construction, design, and financing, giving viewers a sense that, though Vila and his crew were professionals, if they just watched enough home renovation on television, maybe they could learn to do the dang thing themselves.
Fast forward 41 years, and we not only have whole networks devoted to all things home buying, home renovating, and gracious living, but bonafide stars in the DIY TV space, like Property Brothers Drew and Jonathan Scott and Fixer Uppers Chip and Joanna Gaines. (According to some sources, the Scott brothers are together worth a reported $250 million and counting.) Those stars even have furniture and rug lines, eponymous magazines, and even, in the Gaines case, a new TV network all their own.
Undoubtedly, the current television hub of all things home renovation is HGTV, which started with a $25 million budget in 1993 and was bought by Discovery, Inc. for $12 billion in 2018. According to Architectural Digest, the network is cables fourth most popular broadcaster, averaging drawing 1.3 million viewers at any given time, and riding Americas increasingly voracious appetite for transformation television. At the same time the network was developing, Americas housing market was cresting, with Architectural Digest reporting, that, In 1994, Home Depot reported net sales of $12.47 million; in 2018, that number was $108.2 billion. Lowes Home Improvement saw net sales rise from $6.1 million in 1994 to $71.3 billion in 2018.
All that is to say that, while theres not a lot of serious critical chatter about home renovation shows like Celebrity IOUand Flip Or Flop, that doesnt mean that millions upon millions of people arent religiously watching them. Indeed, networks like HGTV are providing the programming thats watched everywhere from cozy couches to harshly lit hospital waiting rooms, bringing the oddly comfortingand inherently untruefeeling of a quick and clean renovation to semi-distracted viewers on the regular.
But why do we love transformation TV so much, and what is it about shows that essentially feature the framework over and over again that we find so comforting? To get to the foundation of these questions, we dialed up a construction crews worth of experts, from actual HGTV stars to comedians who have made names for themselves expounding on their love for the network.
From HGTV, we talked to the Property Brothers themselves, Drew and Jonathan Scott, as well as Flip Or Flops Tarek El-Moussa and Love It Or List Its iconic co-hosts Hilary Farr and David Visentin. We talked to the networks Senior Vice President Of Programming Loren Ruch, as well as its first homegrown star, David Bromstad, winner of HGTVs Design Star and host of shows on the network like My Lottery Dream Home.
We also talked to HGTV-adjacent stars, like Dan Levy and Natasha Leggero, comedians and hosts of House Hunters: Comedians On Couches, a show thats basically Mystery Science Theater for the HGTV set, but with more marital judgement and fewer sci-fi monsters. Actor Stephen Tobolowsky and comedian Orlando Leyba were also happy to walk through their deep, deep knowledge of HGTV, as well as their thoughts about its hosts and trends.
Finally, we were joined by Everything Iconic host Danny Pellegrino, an avowed disciple of both Fixer Upper and T.J. Maxx, and Samuel Dodd, who, as an Assistant Professor Of Art History at Ohio University, has written extensively about what we as a culture learn from channels like HGTV.
Graphic: Julie Mullins, featuring: David Bromstad, Hilary Farr, and Orlando Leyba.read more
It’s demo day: Breaking down our obsession with home renovation TV
