Is it ABC’s intent to make everyone who watches Extreme Makeover Home Edition into blubbering, sobbing fools? Every week when I see the good this show does for people, a veritable smorgasbord of emotions wells up inside of me… I’m not a guy who is faint or heart or usually overtly emotional about things but when I see what goes on on this show I usually shed a tear or two…
For those who don’t know - EMHE is a show where the broadcast company ABC (one of the largest in the USA) chooses one family who has some sort of unfortunate occurance happen - a sick man’s last dying wish, a young girl with an immunodeficiancy that could kill her etc…etc… And they tear down their usually dilapitated home and put up a mini-mansion fully decorated and decked out to the 9’s… Really giving some people a new lease on life. I absolutely love the premise.
Anyone agree it is the most tear jerking show on TV today?
What happens when they build a fabulous expensive house in a poor neighborhood, the property values all go up and the whole neighborhood, including the recipients of the feel-good charity, can no longer afford the taxes to stay in their homes?
I’ve always wondered about that. My roommate watches the show all the time. It makes for feel-good TV, but I wonder what happens after the happy-van has moved on?
Yeah, I admit it, this show has caught me blubbering several times.
Really the best part of it is that usually the home builder tears up the mortgage for the family and usually they also have some sort of trust fund account set up by the local (and probably national) sponsors for expenses like bigger electric bills and such. Cheap advertising for the building company and an even more feel good ending because it answers the question of how are they going to pay for upkeep.
Last fall they did a house here locally and it was the talk of the town for the 2 weeks they were here. The family was very deserving…single father, firefighter who saved the life of a local paramedic who was shot in the line of duty. The paramedic is who nominated him for the EHM. I don’t feel like looking it up, but I think the story also involved him adopting two brothers who were without a family…so in effect he was raising 3 kids of his own and adopted two more…all teenagers. The house of course was gorgeous!! And it’s quite a tourist attraction here as well!!
It’s nice to have a show like this that really does something to help people, done by caring individuals. What a change of pace from the usual crap fest that is network TV.
I’ve never seen EHM, but I know how shows like that can stick with you. I will never forget an Oprah episode in which she surprised a family with a new house. Just remembering the expressions of sheer joy on their faces is enough to make me misty-eyed.
God, how I long to be rich enough to be able to do things like that. It must be an awesome feeling, knowing that you made people so happy.
I’ve also heard that the workmanship on the houses they build tends to be really, really shoddy, and a lot of people have had to sink thousands more dollars into it to make it liveable. But I have no idea how reliable that information is.
…I would never watch this programme. Sappy, feel good, mushy, blech.
[Confession time] When this show was on last year, I used to sneak into my brothers room, and watch it with the sound down low so my family wouldn’t hear what I was watching. I would then settle in and watch Ty and co make people’s lives better, and by the end of it, I’m normally a blubbering idiot. Great show, doing great things for deserving people. Its a programme where everybody wins, from the sponsors to the contractors to the hosts to the families: I can’t honestly find anything wrong with the show. In an attempt fo find some dirt on the programme, I checked out the wikipedia page, and I ended up a blubbering mess again. Its on my list of “must see” shows, however I wouldn’t dare let my family know that their 32 year-old son is a closet fan. [/end confession]
The first year, when they were remodeling peoples’ homes to make them nice, I just enjoyed the show without question. But lately my concerns have been growing
For example, what about the sheer size of the McMansions they’re building? Like that single guy who’d adopted his niece and nephew after his sister died – do three people really need a 5,000+ sq ft house? Just the cost of heating/cooling some of those monsters gives me pause! And not only do the families often seem like they’re not in a position to really be able to afford to maintain the houses, but they’re often absolute monsters compared to the property around them.
I also, alas, became even more skeptical when legitimate news reports came out about a family on the show (Kansas City area, I believe) who, while their house was indeed a wreck, also had bought a 200K piece of property (a former Salvation Army mission, I believe) the year before, and shortly after the show was shot and their new house was built, that piece of property turned out to be right next door to where a new baseball stadium is being built, so they made out like bandits. And there was quite a bit of local grumbling at all the kids getting full ride scholarships to the local state university while a lot of other equally or more deserving kids get squat.
So I do have to wonder at not only their selection of families, but the wisdom of going insane with the size of the homes they’re building. Don’t get me wrong, if it’s a genuine hardship family, I love it; but there have been a few times lately when I just found myself annoyed at what they’re doing.
I often wonder where they get all the funding for such McMansions…But then I see all the product placement in the homes, and the endorsments they are getting. I’m going to do a little research into how they pick the families… because I have wondered a lot of what MamaTiger brought up…
I forgot where I read it, but someone analyzed the appeal of the show by saying it’s a modern-day remake of Queen for a Day. Which seems an apt description, IMO. I also recall reading that the familes chosen for the show are selected largely for their hard-luck stories and emotional appeal, which means that we’re all being played by a fiddle here.
That said, I still think the episode featuring “Sweet” Alice Harris and the South Los Angeles makeover remains the epoch of the series.
There was a piece in the LA Times Magazine (Its called West, now) about two years ago, IIRC, where the reporter ended up on one of these shows, and had to spend nearly 5 figures to re-repair it. She then interviewed others who had been on such shows, and found it was generally the same.
HOWEVER, I believe these were the “makeover” shows, like Trading Spaces, that were the focus, not EMHE, which tends to do extensive rebuilding. I have no trouble believing that I can’t really remodel my home to belong on the cover of House Beautiful in a day, but given the average amount of professional manpower that EMHE brings to bear each episode, I find it at least plausible they can do what they do in a week.
I mean, there are a ton of rebuildig projects going on around my town that seem to take months, but most days, you don’t see a soul working on them. I don’t have trouble believing that it’s a few weeks work for the ten or so guys who manage to stretch it out to four months. You take seventy of them and pay overtime (you routinely see people working through the night on the show), it could happen in a week, no prob.
They might be able to do all the building in a week. Maybe. But it’s got to take months of planning first. No way does Ty just run up to the house with a bullhorn, quickly jot down some ideas and make the tear-filled “miracle” happen. You’d have to submit, get all sorts of approval from various government agencies, etc. I’d bet a lot of these houses are pre-built off-site someplace in advance, then hauled in, long before the very special episode.
Well, the simple fact is that you can’t do everything in a week; it takes longer than that just to arrange all the inspections. I think their actual schedule is more like 10-15 days.
I haven’t heard anything about poor construction, although earlier on they were criticized for building massive houses that didn’t fit into more modest neighborhoods, and for building houses so large that their occupants couldn’t afford to heat or cool them properly. It seems lately that they’ve been giving cash gifts as well as houses, which will offset the increased utility and property tax costs, and the houses aren’t quite as palatial as they once were, so they blend better into their neighborhoods.
Now, the “Trading Spaces” type shows, where you get lunkheads stapling hay to the wall…those homeowners sometimes wound up with some hefty repair bills.
Elder Son and I sometimes watch this show (shhh! guilty pleasure for us both) and we’ve been wondering about some of the things addressed in this thread, primarily how families that don’t have the time and/or money to fix up the houses they’re living in are supposed to come up with the time and money to maintain these spectacular houses they’re given. Interesting to read the answers, it appears ABC has learned quite a bit along the way.
That still leaves one thing that vaguely bothers me, though. The kids’ bedrooms are often real dream rooms, for that child at that moment in time. I wonder how much thought is given to the fact that children grow up - can the theme elements be removed or changed without destroying the room? Much can be done with two coats of paint and some new linens, but some of the special design elements appear to be built in. I’d hate to think that the three-year-old boy who’s so thrilled by his Winnie the Pooh room grows up to be a vaguely embarrassed ten-year-old who tries to hide the built-in honeypots when his friends come over. (And yes, this is the woman who painted her son’s room ORANGE! talking…)
I was wondering this myself… What about the little girl who last week had aplane - yes a real Cesna plane - built into her room… What happens when she grows out of it?
I think the episode I liked the most was the one where they built a house for the family of Lori Piestewa, the first female Native American soldier killed in Iraq. I don’t think there was a dry eye on the show, or me for that matter. I’m glad they got a nice home to live in.
Actually, yes. In fact, an article linked right here on the Straight Dope about this very issue, as well as the monkey business the show is pulling with saddling the homeowners with potentially hugely unaffordable property taxes, is why I quit watching that show.
There was also another article linked in that thread that’s no longer viewable, that exposed some shenanigans about an episode filmed in Bakersfield, where the supposed homeowner wasn’t really the homeowner at all, but her mother-in-law was. And the M-I-L’s house on the adjacent property was shielded from visibility during filming of the show. It might not seem like such an egregious omission, however, the entire premise of that episode was the fear that the widowed mother was in jeopardy of losing the family farm. Only, not.
Sorry, but I refuse to have my heartstrings manipulated by what may ultimately turn out to be a financial burden for the families, and by stories that stand a chance, however slight, of not even being entirely true.
