I watch a lot of house hunting, house flipping, renovation type shows on TV. I personally live in a 1100 square foot ranch house that’s had some updating over the years, but nothing as extravagant as some of these shows. There have to be new stainless steel appliances, marble or granite countertops, all new cabinets, knocking out entire walls for “open concepts”.
The one I saw last night on Property Brothers took the cake. Besides all of the above, they chose flooring that was $2.00 /ft more expensive than solid hardwood, wanted a $10,000 custom closet, and kept doing more and more “necessities” and blowing their budget.
Are people nowdays really this spoiled / picky / hedonistic or do they select these particular type of people for TV shows to make for good television. I guess there’s nothing dramatic about new paint and replacing the old 1960s harvest gold appliances with inexpensive white ones.
My theory is that watching People Behaving Badly makes the rest of us feel better about our own non-attention whoring lives. Which explains the inexplicable popularity of reality television.
Not everyone is like that but those people certainly exist in abundance. There are tons of those houses around here. They have everything you see on the shows and then some. My mother has a house like that in Texas and it is one of many in a sea of them.
The funny thing is that is that McMansions themselves are going out of style pretty quickly. The whole general concept is going to look really dated in a few years. Baby Boomers are going to die off or want to downsize and GenX’ers who always had more sense than their parents generally don’t flock to the same style. There is going to be a giant clearance sale on overly large, not so well built houses in 20 years.
Well, of course the producers are going to select the most dramatic people they can find. Most people are going to want to watch the drama, not watch other people make sensible decisions. I remember reading an article about how to get selected as an audience member for The Price Is Right show…basically, you were supposed to be as outrageous in appearance and actions as possible, because that’s what the producers were looking for.