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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
On the wildly addictive "Trading Spaces," two neighbors remodel bedrooms while producers and designers reinvent something else -- reality.
Nov 26, 2002 | Press pause. You see three people on their knees in the corner of an empty bedroom. Two of the people are wearing matching shirts, and they're watching the third. He's wedging a screwdriver under the lid of a paint can. A few trays and a roller sit on the dropcloth that covers the carpet. The stuccoed wall behind them is white and clean. There is nothing else to see.
Pull back; everything's still paused. You weren't really looking directly at the three people. You were staring at a small TV monitor, peering over the shoulder of a woman dressed in all black. In front of her the same three people are still on their knees, but there's a well-built man with a camera on his shoulder standing so close they'll hit their heads on the camera lens if they move. Look to the right: Near the window are two men wearing shorts; one has headphones connected to a bag of small antennae. Back up, turn around, go past the guy with the notebook near the door. Follow the cables that lead from a digital video camera mounted high up in the room to a small monitor in the hallway at the top of the stairs. More people are gathered here. Behind them you see other bedrooms full of the furniture from the bedroom you just left.
Keep going, down the carpeted stairs, covered with something that feels like the lining of diapers. Move into the kitchen, where couches are stacked. Push past the makeshift curtains to the sewing tables in the family room. Go out the garage door, past the associate producer walking between the houses, past the tented table in the driveway that holds breakfast tortillas, past the caterer. Look to the left, at the driveway next door, where a larger canopy covers a work area where two people are sawing and hammering. Cross the street, past the minivan whose driver is staring at the two houses. Stop near the crowd watching the scene you just left from lawn chairs and the curb. It is 10:31 a.m. and you are in a suburban neighborhood 30 miles northeast of Houston. This is the set of the 39th episode of the second season of TLC's "Trading Spaces."
If you've never heard of the show, you've managed to escape its cultural saturation. Now in its third season and continuing to build momentum, "Trading Spaces" is based on the BBC's "Changing Rooms." Its premise is this: Two sets of neighbors switch houses for two days, and, led by a designer with a $1,000 budget, redecorate a single room in their neighbor's house. Both teams share a carpenter. At the end of Day 2 the host reveals the rooms to the homeowners, who usually say, "Oh my God." Sometimes, however, they cry.
Hillary Clinton is a fan of "Trading Spaces." So far this season well over 3 million viewers have watched the show's new episodes on Saturday nights, often beating "SpongeBob SquarePants" and even "WWE Raw." The show has been criticized by the producer of the show's atrophying and distant cousin, "This Old House," and has inspired a flurry of copycats. From rock stars redecorating rooms for their fans using "the artist's own style and signature" (VH1's "Rock the House") to shows where one resident surprises his or her housemate with a redecorated room (TLC's "While You Were Out"), domestic-themed nonfiction television programs have multiplied and picked up speed in the wake of "Trading Spaces." Maybe years of being unable to successfully turn their homes into Restoration Hardware showrooms by themselves prompts people to watch and then participate, or maybe what people will do to get on TV has just expanded to allowing a crew of strangers to invade and remodel their homes.
Watch the episode that involves this bedroom -- "Houston: Appalachian Trail," which frequently repeats -- and you will never see the crew, the cables, the stacked furniture, the crowds of people that only increase in size. You'll never see the sewing coordinator who has done all the sewing. You will not hear him tell a homeowner working in front of the camera that she won't hurt anything because the machine isn't threaded. You also will not know that some of the scenes that take place on Day 1 actually were shot near the end of Day 2. And you will never know how many retakes it took to get the scene right.
You will never see any of this and you are never told about it, yet "Trading Spaces" is not fake. With hand-held cameras, a bright TV news look, and next-door neighbors as its stars, it feels completely real and raw, as if a camera crew just showed up at the door, started filming and then broadcast the results. But as with most reality TV shows, people tend to act surprised and even horrified when they learn what was involved in the production. Here, those revelations come from journalists, homeowners who've been on the show and then written online about their experiences, or from the designers and crew members themselves, and there seems to be a sense of outrage over the lies we've been told, however inconsequential.
Why exactly these revelations make us feel so violated has to do both with how well the cast and crew of the show do their jobs, and how much we've grown to value and accept the false idea that what we see is what we get. But at the very core is a conflict that was evident, on one level or another, nearly every moment of the three days I spent on the "Trading Spaces" set last spring.
