If you’ve been watching HGTV in the past few years, you may have become seduced by its lavish renovations and tales of real estate riches. You may have decided to stretch your budget to buy your own overpriced house. And you may now, like the contestants on HGTV’s newest reality show, wish you had a little cash to get out of the hole. Say, a quarter-million bucks.
HGTV’s $250,000 Challenge, debuting May 31, is set in housing-busted Sherman Oaks, Calif., where five families compete in a home-renovation contest to win the titular sum. One family sank everything into a home it bought a year and a half ago, which has since lost $150,000 in value. A single mom faces foreclosure. A laid-off father of two says, “Unless we win this, we could be the next for SALE sign on this block.” To see the perpetually optimistic HGTV announce so frankly that homeowners are up a creek is like watching Dick Cheney go on Meet the Press to declare that waterboarding is torture. But HGTV is hardly the only network trying to figure out how the recession and a political shift have changed America. The underlying question at the just completed network “upfronts,” or fall-schedule presentations to advertisers, was, If we are truly becoming a different society–more abstemious, more modest in our ambitions, more community-focused, or just poorer–what will this new society blow its time watching on the tube The networks today are in the delicate position of promising that their new shows will help advertisers sell things–by capturing the spirit of a new age in which no one is buying. Including the advertisers, who are expected to spend up to 20% less on airtime this year. So TV programmers, trying to read viewers’ minds, are facing the same questions politicians are: Do Americans want to confront their problems or escape them Is the change in the U.S. strictly an economic and temporary one, or is there a deeper, lasting transformation in the country’s outlook and values Have our souls changed, or just our bank balances Several networks, betting that viewers want to give the Great Recession a big, cathartic bear hug, have announced new shows about the little guy struggling and the big guy brought low. On ABC’s Hank, a CEO gets downsized; on Fox’s Brothers, an NFL star goes broke; and on the same network’s Sons of Tucson, a banker goes to jail for corporate crimes. The reality-show premises are even starker: “desperate” entrepreneurs plead for financing on ABC’s Shark Tank; on Fox’s Somebody’s Gotta Go, employees of an actual small business each week will vote on which one of them should be laid off; on CBS’s Undercover Boss, execs take on dirty jobs in their own companies. The History channel, meanwhile, announced a reality series about a Las Vegas pawnshop. Other programmers are banking on a broader change in mind-set for the Obama era. MTV, which spent most of the Bush Administration blinging out with Cribs and My Super Sweet 16, is slotting more-idealistic shows, on the theory that young millennials want uplift now. But it’s keeping The Hills, just in case. TV networks tell us what we tell ourselves: that changing times make us changed people, even as we revert to age-old patterns. The zeitgeist makes convenient wrapping to repackage the same sitcoms, hospital dramas and game shows: what was “comfort food” after 9/11, “optimism” in boom times and “inspiration” after Hurricane Katrina is “escapism” today. When TV reflects a shift in the public mood, it often does so counterintuitively: 24 thrived under Bush, but so did The West Wing; Norman Lear’s progressive comedies flourished under Nixon. And for all the change in the news, our top-rated shows remain American Idol and crime dramas, as they have been for years. That said, TV, like dreams, can speak more obliquely. Last year’s big dramas were The Mentalist, Lie to Me and House–jaded hits for the era of Katrina and the subprime disaster, based on the premise that people lie all the time. Maybe 2009’s America–the country that swooned over Susan Boyle–will respond to we’re-all-in-this-together shows like Fox’s underdog musical Glee or NBC’s aptly named sitcom Community, about a diverse group of misfits getting a new start at a junior college. Chances are, though, that the most literal efforts to turn the recession into entertainment will–like past network trend-chasing–end up being too repetitive and too far behind the curve. In which case, pray for the networks to make as many series as possible about the lousy economy. That’ll be the surest sign that the recession is almost over. See the 100 best movies of all time.
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