Let me first begin by declaring that, in what follows, I am not saying anything I haven’t already shared with her. I do not believe that a blog post is the proper venue to speak boldly about matters I am afraid to bring up in personal conversation with my spouse, and while my performance is far from exemplary in the healthy marital communication area, what I am about to say here will be neither novel nor shocking to the fetching Mrs. Ellison’s ears. She’s heard it all before.
And if what I have to say below strikes readers as extreme or fanatical, I can assure you that only my wife has heard the unfiltered version. You are going to read instead the diplomatic, restrained, Hitler’s-foreign-minister-speaks-to-English-journalists-in-1938 version, which I share in the public interest and not out of some desire to take a private matter into the open.
But I absolutely detest HGTV. It is a tool of diabolical agency, and people who watch it regularly and uncritically, even with the mute function firmly engaged as I recommend, are in desperate spiritual peril. This is not something about which reasonable people who are striving for holiness can disagree.
All the programming on HGTV exists for one purpose: to make viewers dislike their own bathrooms, kitchens, homes, husbands, and entire lives—and then to make them try to soothe this acute and burning pain with the salve of spending ghastly sums of money on home-improvement goods and services conveniently offered by the advertisers and sponsors of the programming. The network starts by aggravating the unease and longing that are a fundamental dimension of our fallen, sinful homelessness in the world, but then, exchanging a lie for truth, they stimulate appetites for things like polished granite counters and hardwood floors instead of, well, Heaven.
Do they make one in onyx?
The shows excite our love for what St. Augustine rightly calls the lowest order of goods, namely, the beautiful and fungible things of this world, and thus necessarily do they make us less interested in or even aware of higher higher goods that we cannot see or buy at Lowe’s. They make us to desire more ardently not the Beauty that is ever ancient, ever new, but rather the style of shower tile that is really hot this year.
Have you noticed how all those remodeling programs always end with a fake revelation scene, a bastard 
theophany? You know what I am talking about: at show’s end, the surprised homeowners are shown their newly-redone bedrooms or yards by the impossibly well-put-together/hunky/cute/sexy program hosts. A door is opened, a curtain parted, or a truck moved, the soundtrack music gets even more upbeat, and the religiously-ecstatic homeowners ALWAYS shout the same thing when they see the results of the project for the first time: “OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!” Like the Hitler of Mein Kampf, they at least possess the virtue of honestly declaring to the world what they really believe in.
At special moments of clarity, HGTV shows openly celebrate particular instances of the deceptive, meretricious, phony, sham reality that is the general spirit of the entire enterprise. I recently saw a program in which a re-done living room featured a “keggerator”, which looks like a mini-fridge but which actually contains a hidden and fully-tapped pony keg of beer, I guess so that the homeowner (“Oh my God that is SO AWESOME!”) can conceal from his friends the fact that he is a lush, or that he usually drinks Bud Light.
Less demanding than the real thing
This same homeowner was ecstatic over another feature of the redecorated den that I could not have made up even if I wanted to unfairly mock the show: a 9’x12’, digitally-produced WALLPAPER image of a FAKE BOOKCASE, well-stocked with real-looking, life-sized, 2-dimensional images of thick old books of various heights and colors, but with neither authors nor titles on the spines. (Come on: even the phony Great Gatsby had REAL books in his impossibly-perfect sham house on West Egg.) “We had this specially made and flown in from London,” explained the designer-host to the suitably-impressed homeowner (“Oh my God! That looks so REAL!”), apparently having gone to such lengths and expense because no ACTUAL BOOKS could be found on the cheap locally, discarded from public libraries that are moving towards Kindle-only lending, or from schools and colleges jettisoning any printed materials that are more than 5 years old because they cannot be trusted to adequately reflect present victimological orthodoxies.
Now there are plenty of innocuous or even salutary and uplifting things on television, such as EWTN and the Speed Channel. But HGTV is evil, and if you aren’t outraged by it, you aren’t paying attention. Holy Scripture itself speaks about it, and there is nothing more I could possibly add to the Word, so I shall close therewith:
The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully; and he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?
(P.S.: I love you, Honey.)
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Preach it, brother!
Thanks to HGTV we redecorated most of our old house in Minnesota with bold colors that could only possibly work in whatever universe the people on that show inhabit…which is not the real universe. Especially when it snows a ton, husband and wife get fed up with it and move to North Carolina, having to sell that same house which now looks 80% worse than it did to start with! Needless to say it was a short sale…
And to top it all off, we found out that that show House Hunters is completely fake! The buyers have already decided on the house beforehand, then they find 2 other houses they could have gone with so that it looks like they’re choosing a house after looking at 3 options.
In short, saying HGTV is eeeeevil is no exaggeration!
Thank you. I thought I was the only one that gated HGTV!
I have actually never been unhappy with my home after watching HGTV. I’ve never wanted more and the decorating is not even practical.
I guess I’m in spiritual peril now, because I watched a man redo someones backyard? Maybe I am missing the whole point of this blogpost.
But I think I have a lot more to answer for at the end of my day then watching HGTV. Which I rarely do but still……
And Sir, she must really love you!!!!
LOL 
I feel the same way about the Food Network, and our sinfulness in this lustful way is shown in our every increasing obesity rates. So, whether it be food, home, or huband, TV prodoucers know that we are tempted in these ways and exploit them. I think there is a place for mindless TV, but we have to guard ourselves from the tempations therein. BTW, my husband hates HGTV. I hate the Food Network.
Even worse than the 2-D picture bookcase was a perverse practice that a co-worker told me of: where real books are cut up so that only an inch or so next to the spine remains, and the spines glued into a “bookcase” only 2 or 3 inches deep built into the wall. And of course they have to be good looking older books too – you don’t want your fake library to look cheap.
I could only hope that it was a “clever” magazine idea (this was years ago) and the idea never caught on.
I LOL’d multiple times… I like “Holmes on Homes”, if you can’t stand that onyx toilet (ROFL) then moldy houses, decaying from within might be more your cup of tea.
Hey, it’s entertainment! No one is going to be entertained viewing
my comfy but totally unimpressive living room..probably not yours either. It is the same realm of fantasy for adults kids get listening
to fairy tales. We get reality enough in daily life and nightly news!
It will never replace EWTN in my opinion but it still can have a
place in our viewing choices and there is so much worse offered
that I won’t go into here. I do admit the bookcase wallpaper is
a bit over the top….but there is a lot of satire here for those who
do not take this show seriously but rather with a sense of humor
and proportionality. I say relax and enjoy …or use your remote!
Just because created goods are misused does not mean that houses and the beauty within them are evil. Of course a marble counter-top does not compare to the ultimate beauty of heaven, but even the beauty of a counter-top can reflect the beauty of God’s creation.
You sound like a Manichean or a Protestant…but I repeat myself.
Very, very funny. And like all humor, has the ring of truth.
My house will never look like those on HGTV,and I thank God for it everyday because He has wisely given me many faces as opposed to much “facade”.
A vulgar and meretricious beauty, indeed.
This is so well said.
A very fun read. My favorite line of all: “This is not something about which reasonable people who are striving for holiness can disagree.” LOL.
My own discontent, sadly, can be triggered merely by visiting my friends’ houses, which are way better than my own, or (better!0 a trip through a model home community. The latter has no pesky life being lived in it, so it’s like a great big Barbie world.
All things in moderation, I suppose.
Well said. It’s funny because it’s true. Or it’s funny, but it’s also terrifyingly true.