“Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” [] (one star)
Tonight at 10 on ABC/Ch. 7
——
WANNA win a new home on ABC?
Then you’d better get a sob story.
Tonight on ABC, the Powers family of Santa Clarita, Calif., is awarded a new home seemingly because their young daughter survived leukemia.
That’s the reason given on “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” a spinoff of ABC’s weekly plastic surgery pageant “Extreme Makeover,” in which low self-esteem sufferers are awarded a chance to be carved up and remade based on their own tales of unhappiness and woe – essentially, the more woeful the better.
On “Home Edition” – which ABC is positioning as a special for now and a probable series for some time later – the Powerses get their entire 1960s ranch house completely renovated and redecorated in one week while they wait out the construction in the Bahamas, all expenses paid.
The show would have you believe the Powers’ home went to seed because the family was preoccupied with pulling together to help six-year-old Olivia in her battle against leukemia.
Not to trivialize their ordeal, but it’s just as valid to conclude from the show that the Powerses got in over their heads a few years back when they bought a fixer-upper and then realized they had no clue about how to fix her up.
For them, the opportunity to have someone else do it is just about the grandest prize this family could ever receive.
And the results of the seven-day home makeover are stunning enough to make all the Powerses cry and then hug the various members of the show’s team of six designers who did more bickering than actual work.
That’s one reason why the show’s premise is just about impossible to believe. The six so-called designers who were supposed to collaborate on the home’s interior and exterior look couldn’t get together to screw in a lightbulb, much less cram a four-month remodel into 168 hours.
Their constant arguing is a reality-show contrivance and feels as phony as a three-dollar bill.
The real heavy lifting was done by the show’s beefy twin contractors, Pat and Mike, and their crew of 50 laborers. Without them, the six designers would not have been able to find the front door.
Like the Powerses home, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” is such a mess, it could use a redo of its own.