Something good happens

When I come back to the apartment building each week, I always ask the doorman, “Did anything good happen this week – that I would care about?” They always laugh at me and if something good did happen they tell me! Sometimes good things do happen.

There is a place on television where I can always go and reliably find something good happening: HGTV. For the uninitiated, this is Home & Garden Television, a cable station that runs 24 hours a day, largely do-it-yourself (DIY) programming. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like it would be that interesting. However, the great genius of the programming is simple and straightforward. At the beginning of every half hour:

1. There is a problem

2. The experts come in to help, and spend only $2,000 (the magic number)

3. At the end of the program, the problem is solved and the homeowner is happy – often deliriously happy.

4. I am vicariously happy too!

They seem to me to be mostly decorating shows, though they do gardens also, and “find my rental” / “find me a new house” with the same formulaic regularity (three options, renter/homeowner has the suspenseful decision to make of which to pick!) Nothing bad ever happens. It always works out in the end.

When channel surfing (a guilty pleasure of La Calavera when in attention-deficit mode), it’s possible to watch TLC’s shows with similar attributes at the same time as HGTV’s shows, and kind of get a two (or three) for one. This is possible with the one hour program “What Not To Wear” for example, which actually is less simpatico than HGTV’s offering, but in which you can see all the highlights of the hapless subject of WNTW’s journey (clothes thrown out, shopping trips, hair and makeup, and the reveal) and still catch the problem statement, major work effort, and final result on not one but two HGTV episodes. Couch potato heaven.

The net effect of watching several hours of HGTV programming is an odd but vacuous high, in which everyone is happy endlessly, generally chirping away with Canadian accents (oot for out, hoose for house, and so forth) while hopelessly ugly houses are dolled up for the sale by pretty/handsome designers, or home project disasters are fixed by self-righteous, crusading handymen who know more than the city inspector about electricity and plumbing. In the beginning of watching this programming I got some good ideas for painting and decorating, but these days it’s more spectator sport to criticize the approach – Mr. Bear can be tempted into this mind-candy in weak moments, and takes great pleasure in eloquently talking about what crap the solutions are, often all the way through the commercials and into the next section, when he must be shushed. It’s so much fun!

Attractive and well-meaning hosts of HGTV.

I have never seen even a single dark moment in one of these shows until yesterday, and if you weren’t watching closely, it could have been missed. A teenage girl had called a back yard fix-it show to come in and fix her dad’s shed, which was such an eyesore that a neighbor had reported them to the town who had inspected and condemned it. When the crew arrives, the back yard looks like it accidentally came from the “Hoarding: Buried Alive” show – clearly the habitation of a hoarder. Without skipping a beat, the crew sized up the situation and decided they could build a better (and compliant) shed, but that at the same time they would tidy the back yard.

It seemed pretty clear when Dad, a musician and martial arts instructor, came home, that this was his first introduction to this project. A look of blind panic came across his face, but the pressure was on and he had to agree to the program. Just like in “Buried Alive,” there were a few shots of the helpful team showing him the garbage piece by piece, before putting it into the dumpster, and poor Dad saying, “Well, I was thinking I could use it for this and that” while the crew poo-pooed it and he agreed to throw it away.

In the requisite 28 minutes (commercials included) the back yard was tidied, a new path was laid, it was made safe for little brother to play there, and a pretty, new shed was built. Smiles all around! But at the very end, the host remarks to Dad, “Now that you have this great shed, maybe you can have this same kind of activity inside the house and clear it up the way we have the back yard” – to which Dad wanly smiles and nods. Oy vey.

Fortunately, the very next half hour was back to happy and complacent problem solving, with relatively normal people.

As Martha Stewart would say, “It’s a good thing.”