Love It Or List It
Another season of finished basements and unfinished lives.
Imagine my delight when I discovered a new season of Love It Or List It lurking on Amazon. Just take a moment. Allow yourself a wash of vicarious joy. Deep breath in. Let it out slowly, secure in the knowledge that calming voice-overs are in your future. And—rest. HGTV loves you. HGTV wants you to be happy.
Love It Or List It combines the agony of choice with the thrill of a before and after, all about whether a couple is going to remain in their house or move to a slightly nicer house. To amplify the drama of what ought to be a fairly straightforward life choice, their house is made slightly nicer over the course of the show.
It’s very rare that a married couple is moving homes without children, either theoretical or actual, in the mix. The fact that this show requires that its grateful victims already own a home in order to be eligible usually means that children have become involved. Money is the subtextual drama underpinning every episode. How much money is in the budget? What will it buy? Do the homeowners have realistic expectations of how far their money will go? Do any of us have realistic expectations?
The avatars of change and chaos, the trickster gods before whom we must quail in respect, are Hilary and David. Hilary is an interior designer, David a realtor. She redesigns houses based on what the families tell her they need, David shows them blank slates with more space for their needs, and off we go. They are nominally competing with one another, and they delight in a certain amount of country club-appropriate trash talk.
Hilary is Cruella de Ville’s vegetarian sister. She is perfectly dressed, whether she’s wearing a soft tie-dyed Henley with a pair of light wash denim pedal pushers, or brocade skinny jeans and a power blazer. Every necklace she owns is a statement piece, and the statement is, “I know better than you.” She is regal, standing atop a large kitchen island with her spiked heel planted firmly on the neck of any mortal man who dares tell her that he can’t knock out a wall betwixt kitchen and family room. The Queen of the Open Concept, Lady of the All-New En Suite, Mother of Mudrooms, First of her Name, etc. and so on. There is no problem she cannot solve with money, and she will banish anyone who interferes with her design to a delightful, but tiny, home office. And they will like it.
David is a bottle of Clearly Canadian that has been vigorously shaken. If you held him up to your ear, you would hear the hiss of escaping stress, like an ocean shell who very much wants to be put back in the water, right now. He radiates the nervous energy of a show dog, aware that his is the intrinsically harder job. He is obscenely literal, the IRS auditor of realtors. “Oh, so it’s important to you to have windows?” he asks, in the tone of one who thinks this is completely ridiculous. “You should have made room in the budget for that.” But he is also surprisingly tender as he pleads with these hapless homeowners to see the advantages of homes that are much bigger than the ones they currently own. “Look at all this space! I’m trying to show you another way of life!”
David is a lone figure, jogging up driveways and driving around subdivisions in search of the perfect home. One imagines that he does not always restrict himself to homes that are actually on the market. You might be cooking dinner one evening to find a pleasant man in slim-fit suit pants and a checked shirt poking his head in the door. “Does this house have five bedrooms? Finished attic great room? Yes? Have you ever thought about moving? I know some people who need your house!” You wouldn't mind if this happened, though, such is David's sardonic charm when he chooses to deploy it. You'd probably invite him in.
If David is a lone wild card, Hilary is a queen. And what is a queen without an army of retainers? Chief among these is Contractor Erik, who at some point is promoted to Construction Manager Erik before he vanishes entirely. But for many seasons, it is Erik to whom we must look for the real magic. Erik is a large bald man whose spiritual home is a Gold’s Gym in Great Neck. He carries a graph paper composition notebook and is possessed of that most arcane knowledge, the phone number of the local building department. He is the only man allowed to say the words “load-bearing wall” in Hilary’s presence. Erik is the beating, bloody heart of Love It Or List It, a pragmatist trapped in Hilary’s neutral-toned world of dreams.
At times there are also Contractor Jason, Contractor Zack, and Contractor Hank. All these men are loyal and brave, standing up to her when a floor needs to be redone, or when a stack can’t be moved within the constraints of the almighty budget, or when something isn’t up to code. I know I couldn’t face Hilary’s quicksilver, eye-narrowing wrath. “What do you mean, I ‘can’t’ give them a wet bar?” she says, an unholy subsonic rumble in her voice. “Who doesn’t have a wet bar?” You get the feeling that no one, in Hilary’s world, doesn’t have a wet bar. Her tone is dangerously incredulous. At any moment those men might find themselves locked in bottles for a thousand years, and they know it, but they hold their ground. After a few moments her lip curls and she says, “Well, I don’t know how I’m going to work this out.” Everyone breathes a collective sigh of relief as she stalks away.
The renovation is the most interesting part of the show, as Hilary does for houses what the Fairy Godmother did to Cinderella’s gown. There are only so many completely empty McMansions with vast foyers suitable for rock climbing walls and open concept kitchen/family rooms that you could flood, freeze, and play hockey in that David can stand to march people through. And if you think their expectations for what Hilary can accomplish are unrealistic, you haven’t lived until you watch David’s walkthroughs. Watching these yahoos object to the “cookie cutter homes” David shows them while they’ve just finished hectoring Hilary into giving them a cookie cutter home is wild.
“I just can’t see myself here,” the husband says, as if that settles anything, while the wife glares daggers into him. The thought bubble over her head clearly reads, “You won’t be here, you ding-dong. You’re never here. And you’ll be living in whatever house you want with your second wife if you keep objecting to everything that I’m telling you will make my life easier.”
Of course the show is only interesting when there’s drama, and the drama this show has chosen to feature is how one person in the marriage does not want to move, while the other person in the marriage does. This is riveting, obviously, various emotional considerations taken into account and so on. The question of moving or staying is shifted on to David and Hilary, as each asks the recalcitrant spouse to tell them what will “get” them to either move or stay. In my not at all scientific study, which was done by watching nine seasons of this show in roughly three weeks, I found that in general more women (who tend to be stay-at-home parents) want to move than men, unless the men are the stay-at-home parent, in which case they want to leave and their wives want to stay. I conclude from this that the person in the marriage who is in the house all day will want a total change of scenery, and the person who is only home for a grand total of one waking hour in the morning and maybe four hours in evening, most of those spent in front of the television set, will not be so sick of it. After all, they’ve spent way less time there. This is why, I think, when David says “I want to show you another way of life,” he’s talking to the stay-at-home partner.
Sadly for David, most people—even unhappy, overwhelmed people—don’t really want another way of life. At least, not another way of life that they can get while keeping their husband and children. They want their current way of life, only repainted and with a giant kitchen island plunked down in the middle of it. They want their current way of life with some more equity in their home and a renovation partially paid for courtesy of a reality TV show that demands nothing more from them than living in their in-laws’ basement for a couple of months and a few afternoons of filming. In this economy? What could be bad.
The show is stacked in favor of Our Lady of the Statement Necklace, as she replaces all the furniture, creates a beautiful mudroom/laundry room combination, and gives everyone more closet space. She is taking careof these people on their own terms, turning their first homes into ready-made dollhouses just waiting for all their stuff. (And, presumably, many couples take these eight or twelve-week renos as an opportunity to get rid of a lot of their stuff, which is honestly the only thing most of them really needed to do in the first place.)
While the arguments about garage size and basement laundry are ageless, even the world of Love It Or List It changes sometimes. In more recent seasons, Hilary has traded her stilettos for bright sneakers and pristine, designer tennis shoes. Hilary and David have let go of some of the arch nastiness in their dynamic, instead gently teasing each other about Hilary’s driving, which seem fine, and David’s shirts, which are always lovely.
Love It Or List It has taken on new urgency in pandemic time. I wonder if a lot of these couples would have chosen differently if they knew what was coming. Maybe the sheer square footage David puts on offer would have triumphed more frequently. Maybe they wouldn’t have been so quick to ask Hilary to make their homes open plan, chasing family togetherness in the age of the cell phone, if they knew that their kids would have to be doing all their schooling virtually.
But it’s okay. It’s all okay. That’s what David and Hilary are promising us on Love It Or List It, really. That’s the fantasy. There are no bad choices. Either way, it’s going to be beautiful. And I know that’s what I need right now.