Charity Begins at Home

By James Poniewozik

Alice Harris of South Central Los Angeles fondly remembers the day when the good people from ABC volunteered to demolish her house. In 2003 a flood left the community activist and her family, who had no insurance, living in one bedroom. Worst of all, the waters ruined a stash of Christmas toys Harris had collected for poor kids. "I figured no one was going to come to Watts and help us," she says. "No one had ever done that."

That was before Extreme Makeover: Home Edition found her. Home Edition brought in its army of designers, led by bullhorn-wielding host Ty Pennington, to do what it does best: destroy a home in order to save it. After shipping Harris and kin off for a week's vacation in Carlsbad, Calif., 100 workers and neighbors tore her home down to the foundation and built a new, bigger one. They replaced the Christmas toys and donated appliances, mattresses and landscaping to her flood-stricken neighbors. They even threw in a basketball court for the neighborhood kids.

Home Edition (Sundays, 8 p.m. E.T.) is a TV oxymoron: a feel-good reality show. Without any participant's having to eat animal entrails or be insulted by judges, it has exploded in its second season into a Top 10 hit by presenting itself less as a home-improvement show than a life-improvement show. Each week the design team meets a family with a heart-wrenching story--disability, death, debt--and tailors a monster renovation to its needs. For the Vardon family of Oak Park, Mich.--two deaf parents with a blind, autistic son named Lance, 12, and a sighted son Stefan, 14--the team built a house with high-tech aids, including flashing-light smoke alarms and Braille labels on the walls. The Vardons also got a $50,000 college scholarship for Stefan.

In essence, Home Edition is like the reality-TV version of It's a Wonderful Life, in which Bedford Falls pitches in to rescue solid citizen George Bailey. Executive producer Tom Forman says the show's makers assess applications on "need and, to the extent we can judge it, merit. We look for people who have been nominated by their neighbors, people whose communities have told us are really special." The show also hews to the old formula of something for Mom, Dad and the kids: five-hankie stories, plus home-improvement tips, plus guys ripping off roofs with tractors. The renovations run to several hundred thousand dollars, the costs defrayed by conspicuous product placements.

Home Edition is part of a mini-revival of fairy-godmother TV, recalling Queen for a Day, the 1950s show on which women won prizes for their sob stories. Oprah Winfrey has dedicated this season of her talk show to realizing people's "wildest dreams." In September she gave away Pontiac G6s to her studio audience. The trend comes, curiously, during a slowdown, or even decline, in charitable donations that began in the 1990s and at a time when the era of Big Government do-gooderism is long since over. If a federal program were building multi-six-figure dream homes for the afflicted, Rush Limbaugh would have an aneurysm. Yet nearly 20 million a week cheer ABC's life-changing largesse. Home Edition is charity for the Bush era, harnessing the power of private enterprises like Disney and Sears to provide a high-entertainment safety net. It even involves faith-based initiatives, as when the crew goes to one family's church to enlist neighbors to volunteer for the construction crew. "It's like a community barn raising," says Pennington.

This may be the key to Home Edition's appeal: it lets viewers see themselves as George Bailey's selfless neighbors and America as Bedford Falls. And ABC plans to continue spreading the wealth, spinning off Extreme Makeover: Wedding Edition, while other networks are readying their own feel-good "wish fulfillment" reality shows. There should be plenty of applicants. Home Edition is getting a thousand a week. Which means TV had better start rolling up its sleeves.

--Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles