Renovation Reality Television



Renovation reality television may focus on a particularly poor family or a well-to-do family and either create a first-time house or a dream house. These are the two most popular classifications within this sub-genre, but there are many shades of grey in between. Sometimes, building a home that has been devastated by a flood may be at one end and creating a dream home on top of an existing home of an upper middle class family may be another thing all together.



Renovation reality television makes over a person's entire living quarters, work area, or vehicle. This Old House was the first show to do that, and it came out during the late 1970s in 1979! Changing Rooms, a British show that debuted 20 years later, was the first renovation show that hybridized and combined elements of the game show with a different set of weekly contestants each week. Several other shows that fit into this category include Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Debbie Travis' Facelift, Designed to Sell, Overhaulin', While You Were Out, Holmes on Homes, Restaurant Makeover, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and Life Laundry. These shows all improve someone's life by taking what they've got and making it better. This often creates a much happier camper at the end of the show. Life Laundry was a show that took renovation to the extreme that had a focus on hoarders that were storing away stuff and gave them pro assistance to help them overcome their condition. There is a gray area of this category of renovation shows as it relates to reality television and other formats. Renovation often takes on a whole new supercharged meaning as opposed to the makeover and self improvement genres. These sub-genres take something that you would never expect could be transformed and transform it overnight, over a series, or over several seasons. Renovation is really just a variant of lifestyle television that radically alters a lifestyle in a period of a few weeks.



Extreme Makeover: Home Edition was a reality tv show that epitomized renovation, and it dwarfed the popularity of Extreme Makeover, its predecessor. It was spawned by the success of Extreme Makeover, but it was cancelled early. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition came out in 2003, and it was a spin-off of Extreme Makeover that was much more successful than the plastic surgery edition.



Restaurant Makeover is another makeover edition show that makes renovation fun and simple for the food industry. Criticism seems to point to the fact that the show is a kiss of death for the restaurant in question because the press coverage dies shortly after the restaurant is aired on television. The restaurant was going to die anyway, but the show merely keeps it up a little longer. The show is hosted by several famous chefs and designers, and they perform renovation makeovers on several restaurants that are in great need of transformation. The goal of the show is to have a professional chef and a designer overhaul the restaurant and make it more profitable. The show would match the funds of the restaurant owner up to a fee of $20,000, but that eventually dwindled to $15,000 as the show went on. The show eventually dwindled itself in popularity too.

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