TV to fold laundry to

If there’s one mini-genre of writing I’m tired of reading, it’s a certain type of criticism of HGTV shows. Sure, I like to read the gossip about Chip and Joanna Gaines or whatever. What I mean is those think pieces about the fakeness or deeper meaning of the shows, as if some writer is going to turn your world upside down by revealing that a show or on-air personality is—GASP—somewhat less than authentic. Or that there’s—haul over the fainting couch!—a darker side to the network’s shows. 

 

I mean like this article that critiqued Home Town or this one that critiqued Fixer Upper. These were the only two I could find with a quick search but I have read more of them over the years. There are these specific rhetorical tricks in articles like these. It’s hard to describe but it’s like the writer transcribes what’s going on in the episode and does a sort of book-of-the-movie versions, annotating the text of the show and giving a semiotic importance to every little mundane thing. It imparts a vaguely sinister tone onto something most people would find harmless. Let me try it:

The incipient Laurel homeowners stand excitedly in front of the Craftsman house. The house is lovely—although not beautiful—but run down, surrounded by magnolias that could have inspired Faulkner to write a few more chapters set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

 

“This is the Compson house. They lived here for 35 years,” Erin Napier says. “I just think this house is so cute with the columns and big front porch.”

 

“Oh, I love the porch,” says Kathy Drake. Her flowered summer blouse says “mother of two” in that particular way flowered blouses do. “I can see us all sitting out here, just watching the sun set.”

 

“Yeah,” says Erin. “This house just needs a little love, is all.”

 

One wonders what kind of “love” she means. Is it the love that can be found after stripping off George Wallace–era wallpaper and revealing the central rot beneath? The love that can be found as Ben Napier carves a dining room table out of a barn in which Depression farmers once milked prize Holsteins while worrying about how to feed their dusty-haired children?

 

At the end of the hour, after those Craftsman columns have been restored with a postmodern luster, the farm sink has been added, and the built-in bookshelves have been lovingly stacked with evocative yet inoffensive tomes, Erin presents the couple with a watercolor of their new house.

 

“This was the Compson house. Now it’s the Drake house.”

 

Kathy and Michael Drake go a little misty at the drawing. It’s pretty but essentially unreal: the harsh Mississippi summer sun has been sanded down to innocuous pinks and aquas.

 

Look, I know it’s pretty rich for me to complain about pretentious writing or about someone shitting on something harmless that other people enjoy. But writing of this just irks me lately because most people who watch HGTV probably already know the shows have a fake element to them.

 

I know the people on House Hunters have already settled on which house to buy. I know the Fixer Upper families are under contract for the house before they go out looking. I know a lot of the drama is manufactured. I know all this and I will still re-watch Love It or List It episodes I’ve already seen on a loop.

 

You know why I’ll watch these shows? Because they amuse me. HGTV is TV for a rainy Saturday afternoon (or for a pandemic). It’s TV you watch while folding laundry. I know the difference between vitamins and candy bars and sometimes I just want to watch something amusing on TV for a little while before getting back to my novel.

 

It’s not as if I don’t have plenty of criticisms about HGTV. I do, but most of these involve the text of the show and not the subtext: I’ll criticize the design elements, or the people who give the choice between two shades of off-gray backsplash the same gravity as choosing a name for their child, or the people who think having a kitchen island the size of a Buick is some Rosetta Stone to attain the perfect life they believe they deserve.

 

But we all have those criticisms when we watch these HGTV shows; that’s half the fun. Just let people have these simple pleasures and surface criticisms without forcing profundity where there is none.