i really do have better things to do, I SWEAR
2004-11-14

Since it is Sunday, and I have nothing better to do I'm going to bitch and moan about Extreme Makeover: Home Edition for a while. The situation is always the same - white/black family with ten children/orphaned niece or nephew gets their house done over in tacky way by Sears-sponsored crew. Every house has to have a pool, a hot tub, or an "artistic" sprinkler-setup, despite all the houses being in California where there isn't any water. (Yes, I know it is hot in California, and I'm not being self-righteous about saving the rivers of America, I'm thinking about the massive water bill that you'd have from maintaining a water park in your backyard.) The rooms always go in diminishing order - the one child's room that's done with a car bed, a racetrack, and the embalmed corpse of Dale Earnhardt, then the "ballerina" room where they paint ballet shoes on the walls and stick some ribbons up besides them, and then all the other rooms where it looks like they stole the furnishings of a Motel 6 room and threw them on the walls and bed. Fortunately every single room has a plasma TV, except the bathroom, which disappoints me because if I was very rich I would put a TV in front of the toilet and possibly one above the tank.

After all this is done they get the families back. They ooh and ahh over the new house, which would be tolerable if it wasn't constantly intercut with confessionals all along the lines of "I can only thank God for Extreme Makeover." Then they start talking about the host Ty in these tones of worship, just like God had two sons and they were both carpenters. Then they roll out a truck and a sports car and the show is over.

The worst part is that despite the fact that the people on the show seem genuinely in need, I can't bring myself to feel any sort of emotion towards them except scorn at their home furnishings. I think it's because despite all the money spent, the houses are really only improved to a certain level - people who were once living three to a room get a room to themselves, a sick girl gets an air purifier, and so on. And the extras are always the same, a car and a pool. I want to see a home makeover show where none of the changes are functional. Like they make the whole house over into Graceland or something. It also makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable to watch people prostrate themselves in front of Ty Pennington, former Trading Spaces carpenter. For some reason I feel like this is the signal for the end of civilization, although that probably happened years ago, the precise moment being when a sperm met an egg in the depths of Barbara Bush's uterus.

Why is this story not better covered by the press? Maybe after Scott Peterson got put away, all news coverage ever ended for lack of topics, and Big Baby Jesus just died a bit too late to be noticed.