House Hunters

On Tuesday, I watched an episode of House Hunters.  I’ve actually watched several, and almost always enjoy them.  The show is weightless and without import, the television equivalent of diet soda or elevator music, but I watch it and I like it.  A lot, even.  This I confess to you.

I’m not exactly alone, either.  House Hunters, long the flagship series of the House and Garden Network, has been on for thirteen years and produced over 500 episodes and a small fleet of spin-offs.  The show is somewhat unique among reality television series in that it has no host- there’s no Ty Pennington or Gordon Ramsay to pull us from episode to episode, just the prospect of a new person or pair of persons on a quest to find the perfect home.  It’s simple and cheap and may not even be real, but I’ve watched it more than I care to admit, and if it’s on I’ll probably watch it again.  Why?

House Hunters works because it’s relatable.  Take last Tuesday’s episode, the series’ 1084th.  It follows Jonathan and Jenny, a newly married couple living in Atlanta, as they struggle to move out of Jenny’s parent’s basement and into a house of their own.  Jonathan and Jenny are not trying to be the last man standing on a desert island or belt their way to a recording contract.  They’re looking at real estate, comparing square footages and shelf space and roach populations to decide where they’ll hang out for the next few years.  Jonathan is kinda pudgy and Jenny is a brunette- they’re very nearly real people, and we can recognize ourselves in their situation.

House Hunters works because it isn’t relatable at all.   We don’t know what Jonathan and Jenny do for a living, but we know their budget caps out at 300k, and we know that they turn down delightful looking houses because, in one case, the hardwood floors aren’t dark enough, and in another because the toilet doesn’t have its own space apart from the rest of the bathroom.  They throw around words like ‘craftsman-style’ and ‘traditional’ as if they’re architectural terms of art with meanings understood only by them, and at one point bemoan the kitchen of house number three, which unlike my kitchen is not confined to one wall of a living room, as too small.   ‘Just who do these people think they are?’ we ask ourselves.  ‘Tools,’ we answer ourselves, and we feel good.

The show, in short, works for many of the same reasons so much of reality television works, by playing on the eternal tug of war between sympathy and schadenfreude.  We want Jonathan and Jenny to find their happiness, and then we want them to choke on it, just a little bit.  And then there’s the packaging.  Each episode of House Hunters is wrapped up into a discrete, unobtrusive, half-hour box.  You can miss one, two, thirty-eight episodes and pick right up with the nice couple from Delaware or the odd single girl from Nebraksa without missing a beat.  The lack of connective tissue between episodes provides it with a fungible kind of freedom- the structure can be, and has been, endlessly replicated with only small changes and still retain its basic allure.  This wouldn’t be true if the show made more demands of its audience, if it required them to do more than absentmindedly judge whether Jonathan and Jenny made the right choice to sacrifice, say, more square footage for a smaller mortgage, but it doesn’t.  It lets audiences make the fun, easy choices involved with house-hunting and spares them the hard ones, engaging the outer parts of the brains and allowing the rest to slip into a soft sweet torpor.

And that’s why House Hunters is a show I feel like I need to justify enjoying, but that’s also why I’ll watch it again.  And probably again.  And again.  I wonder if it’s on now.