Why Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a guilty pleasure for me

[capri0mni]

Guilty

• It's so fake. The Family of Honor supposedly gets awoken, by surprise at oh-god-thirty with a bullhorn, and there has never been a single case of bedhead or rumpled pajamas. What parallel universe is this? 'Cause it's certainly not one that I've ever been in.


• Ty Pennington and his bullhorn, yelling at people to "move it." Put the damned thing down, and move it yourself, idjit!


• The whole show is a bandaid for the social conscience. One family, beaten down by the injustices of our society, gets rescued because a multimillion dollar company has the ability to turn their plight into our entertainment. And we get off patting ourselves on the back for our generosity and goodness. Take last night's season opener, for example. An army medic gets his leg blown off in Iraq, and the prosthetic leg that the army gives him is so poorly fitting that he cannot bear to use it, so he has to try to get around his too-small house on crutches. the Home Makeover team sends him to a private hospital for his week away so he can get a new leg he can actually use, and after a week of practice, he's not using the crutches anymore, and everything is peaches and cream and happy endings... but what about all the other disabled vets that don't get rescued? The show is so Republican...

Pleasure

• I like to see creative type people work together -- I like to see ideas take shape.


• I'm fascinated by how, after just a quick wander through someone's house, the designers on the team can pick up on clues about what the family is like, what's working and what isn't. I can't help but wonder what a designer would figure out about me from seeing my house.


• Despite the fakery of the "Show," I actually like the ideas the designers have, and the philosophy of melding functionality with personality and having fun (and I often wonder if the designers themselves resent, a little bit, having to act the clown for the sake of making a Disney show out if it, instead of just being left to finish their tasks in hand).
  
• Despite everything, I am a sucker for teh shmaltz.

Comments

[nyxks.livejournal.com]

I also like to watch that show, but at times it pisses me off for various reasons. I would really like to see them do a show outside of the US, like here in Canada for example, we are part of North America after all.

take care,

Nyxks

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm sure there are legal complications involved. Even getting all the county, city, and state permits lined up to be able to do all that work in that short a time must be a headache even within the United States; I imagine it would be even more complicated if international law were brought into it...

But yeah, it is rather 'States-Centric...

[nyxks.livejournal.com]

Well we have a few shows which are older then CSI that are similor in nature, and I don't think it really anything to do with legal stuff, as there are no international laws that need going though - the laws between canada and the us for entertainment production is prity open expecailly when it comes to the production of TV shows - at least it has been the past 10 years that I've been aware of.

oh well regardless - as things go CSI is starting to wind down and who knows where it end

Nyxks

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

Why is it Republican to help a few people even though you can't help them all?

Turning it into entertainment is what makes them a multi-million-dollar company. I guess they could find a slightly more generous happy medium and let more of the money go into producing the show and helping people, if the hosts and producers were willing to be paid less.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Maybe it was last night's show in particular that brought up the feeling of Republicanism, because all throughout, they were repeating the mantra that this soldier was so deserving because he had been over there in Iraq "Protecting Our Freedoms at Home."

And it's not the helping just one family that bothers me, per se, but the general idea of the show fits so neatly into the neo-cons' image of an America where the general welfare of society is delagated to a few rich benefactors and private corporations. I think the happy medium would be found if they could devote more of each hour to actually showing the house being built, and less time showing the hosts clowning around in the aisles of Sears. Yes, I know Sears pays a good chunk of the bill for these houses, but the hosts come this { } close to actually saying: "Buy this bedding! Only $5.95! This week only!"

And, one time, they actually brought in The Muppets to "help" with the building. I love the muppets. But all I could think of was those puppeteers, running around just outside the camera shot, while the real volunteers had to do the real work around them. That was just bordering on the theater of the absurd...

[natashasoftpaw.livejournal.com]

Hi, this is Felix Lockhart from the I Read This forum, I saw that you live in Virginia, and not in NoVA, so I wanted to say hi :-)