THE UTTERLY AVERAGE
Those shows you loved about families, homes and health are back — but nicer
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
Sundays, HGTV
The Biggest Loser
Tuesdays, CTV Life Channel
Wife Swap
Thursdays, Paramount Network
Supernanny
Thursdays, Slice
Our world is dangerously inflamed and imperilled — literally, politically and always metaphorically — yet nothing remains as fascinating as another person’s travails, the next-door drama that’s threaded in with the mundane.
These were the stories that preoccupied an earlier era of reality TV in the mid- to late2000s, when millions of people tuned into prime-time network shows that, in their overblown way, were about everyday people in everyday houses with everyday problems.
The feelings they stirred never went away. Those shows felt real in a way that pop-singer competitions, petulant Real Housewives, conniving Survivors and certainly Donald Trump and his servile apprentices could never achieve, by focusing on the anxieties of the working middle class, the utterly average and totally overwhelmed.
Is it any wonder that we’re still desperately curious about one another? Is that why so many of those vicariously domestic reality shows have come back in recent weeks?
Retooled and revived for cable, these shows feel like old friends who’ve acquired a quieter, easier outlook on life. They are still propelled by a vital thread of inquiry: Who are we in our homes, at our tables, with our families and our worries? Who cries out for help? And who answers?
As ever, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, now hosted by Modern Family actor Jesse
Tyler Ferguson, instead aids the have-nots, as curious about the narrative of need as Charles Dickens was. Here, volunteers and business sponsors step in where the state will not. In the première, the show travelled to Kern County, Calif., where a social worker, Jessica Mosley, a single mom with five children — three of whom she adopted when she learned that the court had deemed them non-adoptable.
From there, it’s a brief litany of disaster: Mosley’s father died, and she lost the home he’d paid for through some complicated matter with his Veterans Affairs loan. So Jessica and her kids moved into the three-bedroom, one-bathroom, Cinderella-style mid-century ranch home owned by Jessica’s mother, Pam.
Just as before, I am more transfixed by the brief glimpse Extreme Makeover gives us of the house in its “before” state and the family’s tour of their cramped conditions — three teenage sisters sharing one small closet; an adolescent boy who still has to share a room with his big sister; a kitchen barely large enough for everyone to gather. Dare one desire to linger here longer, and sense the love and cosiness in these surroundings, which they show as drab and down-market?
Extreme Makeover still blows in with a clamorous sense of purpose and promotional gifts: a local builder donates the entire house; the brand of the paint is mentioned, as is the instantly recognizable name of the appliance store that provides the high-tech refrigerator. No one ever says a word about what this largesse might do to the family’s tax bracket or the neighbourhood’s property values.
Still, there’s a neighbourliness to it that’s often absent from reality TV, and a true heart beneath the show’s lachrymose (and trademark) style of promoting its own saintliness.
And it’s all come back just as the economic signals are as mixed as they were in the show’s original heyday.
Are we living in ceaseless boom times or on the verge of a precarious tumble? Will it take our houses with it? Where else to assuage our fears about all this than on HGTV, which forever shelters the domestic dream from any reality that’s too real?
The ever manipulative Wife Swap, which burned furiously and fascinatingly in the 2000s, has softened a bit, but it’s still the perfect show for the viewer who never believed the reliable adage that the only people who really know what’s going on in a marriage are the two people in it. Wife Swap acknowledges and even honours that chronic nosiness in viewers to get inside other people’s relationships, a mission that’s accomplished here by asking one wife to trade places with another for several days.
Since it’s 2020, things have evolved. Wife Swap happily subverts old gender norms, sending spouses from same-sex marriages and also stay-at-home dads into the process, and not just as novelty acts.
Wife Swap’s remaining outliers are the demonstrably extreme — the family, for example, that home-schools their children and believes there is no way to prove the Earth is round.
The show originally depended on excessive and often unseemly conflict, as the new mom/wife observed how the other family lives and then enacted some temporary rules of her own. The couples compare notes at the end and bicker about the faults they’ve found in each other’s ways of life.
The format, along with the voyeuristic pleasures, are still intact: You get to peer deeply into other people’s homes, while peering just as deeply into their dysfunctions.
In a nation obsessed with divisions, the new Wife Swap more often ends on a note of agreement and reconciliation. It’s a subtle but noteworthy shift that underscores the value of such shows: The more we get a look at how other people live, the more we might understand one another.
The revived version of Supernanny seems at first unchanged, but it, too, has sanded off some of its more judgmental edge. Childcare expert Jo Frost is still firmly in charge, but she long ago chucked the corny, Mary Poppins accoutrements (the black London cab car; the intimidating uniform).
She’s now almost 50, wiser and less intimidating. She counsels the millennial generation of parents whose toddlers are as wildly intractable as those who came before.
Supernanny still goes more deeply into the American household than any other reality show — a remarkable feat of openness in a social media age where mommies and daddies post edited, positive spins on their lives. Frost’s methods are the same (consistent rules, effective consequences), but the stakes don’t seem as dire. The message is that no home has to be perfect, because what home ever is?
The Biggest Loser returned in January to the same criticisms that hounded it years ago: health concerns, lasting physical effects (many of the show’s big losers regained their weight) and mixed signals about body shaming.
Little has changed in nearly two decades, except perhaps the boilerplate text at the end of the show that puts more emphasis on the controlled medical supervision of the show’s 12 contestants.
The new Biggest Loser claims to emphasize lifestyle changes over the numbers on the scale, even if that scale is still an enormous digital display of week-toweek losses revealed during a tense weigh-in, which still leads to contestant eliminations.
Yet here, too, the intensity has been dialed down a tad in exchange for slightly longer segments spent exercising empathy, through longer group discussions and emotional breakthroughs.
The intimacy the show offers adheres entirely to format, but it works for those of us who never stop wondering how the rest of the world copes.
The more we get a look at how other people live, the more we might understand each other.