A Real Design Challenge

A practical decorating show for the Home & Garden set.

Evan Spence | 2003-09-02

I propose a new television show to appeal to a broad audience of design-minded viewers. The show will follow the crews of the numerous other home decorating programmes—the ones where ordinary people re-decorate someone else’s home, with the help of an otherwise unemployable designer—and repair the damage done to those homes. It will be called Liveable Rooms, or Sober Second Thought, or Designs with Resale Value, or some other suitably practical monicker.

The Pitch

Each episode will follow a strict sequence:

  1. A chisel and a crowbar are used to remove any adornments on the walls placed there by the previous crew.
  2. The walls are properly undercoated with a stain-blocking primer.
  3. A tasteful and contemporary hue is selected—with the approval of the owner—and professionally applied without the use of a sponge, a rag, cellophane, or any of the techniques from Debbie Travis’ early evil years.
  4. All of the cute do-it-yourself projects built out of MDF are removed with extreme prejudice, and ceremoniously reduced to the sawdust from which they were spawned. (This part of the show will be filmed gangsta-style, like the fax-machine sequence from Office Space, with the the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage playing while the incensed homeowner goes medieval on the piece with their heel, or something handy and heavy.)
  5. The remainder of the show’s $1,000 budget, which should be somewhere north of $900, will be put toward the purchase of a single, really well designed, possibly used piece of non-Ikea furniture.

That’s the concept: practical decorating help, to undo the damage wrought on these people’s homes by the likes of The Decorating Challenge, Trading Spaces, While You Were Out, One House Two Looks, One Garden Two Looks, Changing Rooms, and the lowest of the low, Much Music’s In Your Space.

This show will sell itself. The sheer volume of the other type of decorating drivel on television tells us the market is ripe for a half hour spot that puts the boots to these miserable, common-sense-bereft excuses for design shows.

If any television executives should happen to see this and decide to air such a show, the pd.o will be satisfied with executive producer credit.

Evan Spence

Tuesday, September 2, 2003
PD DCXV

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