Why Every Renovation Show Looks the Same

A sloth, a donkey, and a curious human send a prompt and see what they're doing. One hits a record with a question on his mind. Two brothers pick it up, see what they find. Cone takes his time, Herman's got the facts. Back and forth, they never hold back. My weird prompts, come on in, that's where we begin. My weird prompts, glad you're here

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Hannah's been watching renovation shows again.

She has, and she's reached the point where she's stopped enjoying them, which is a particular kind of disappointment. You don't stop watching something you never liked.

Right. So she sent us the whole thing. Her question, in her words, is essentially, "Why does every renovation show end up in the same open plan, pale generic space, and is that what people actually want, or is it what the shows want?"

And then a second layer under it.

A second layer. Who's actually designing? Is the host the designer or the face of a design team? How much of what we see is real versus compressed or staged for television? Who's actually paying for the renovation, the furniture, the styling? And the budgets and timelines. She says they seem impossibly low and impossibly fast once you account for design development, procurement, construction, and permitting, which as an architect and a DIY person, she'd notice.

She would.

And then the third layer, which is the one I think she actually cares about most, are there any shows that are design-led, architecturally interesting, and honest about how projects actually happen? She names Grand Designs as feeling closer to that than most, even if she doesn't always love the finished buildings.

That's a very precise thing to say. Even if I don't always love the finished buildings, that's not a complaint about Grand Designs. That's the show working.

Let's pull the wallpaper off this genre and see what's underneath.

Start with the obvious thing, which is that we're not talking about a hobby. We're talking about an industry. Renovation television is a production business with ratings logic, legal exposure, insurance, and a house style. And the house style is downstream of the business, not the other way around.

Say more about house style as a term.

Every production genre develops one. Police procedurals have a look. Cooking shows have a look. Renovation shows have a very specific look. The same open plan kitchen dining living room, the same pale finishes, the same generic styling, the same slightly too bright reveal sequence. And the interesting thing is that it's the same look across countries. Love It or List It in Australia, the UK, Canada, same output. Different hosts, different accents, same room.

Which means it isn't taste.

It isn't taste because taste is local. It's structural. There's something about how these shows are made that produces that room regardless of who's making them or where.

So there are two poles we're gonna use the whole episode.

Two poles. On one side, the HGTV model, Love It or List It, Fixer Upper, Property Brothers, House Hunters. Transformation is the product. The episode ends with a reveal, the reveal is the payoff, and the show is built backward from