Sell My House, Please

I remember a time when the A&E network was about old movies and Peter Graves narrating the biographies of people from old movies. Now, times have changed. People don't want to see old movies or Peter Graves, they want to watch gay designers suck the life out of homes while operating on an obscenely tight budget.

For some reason, we were watching Sell This House, one of about fifty shows to follow this cheapo home makeover theme. It's a show with a simple, yet exceedingly annoying concept. A homeowner is sitting on a half-million dollar home. It hasn't sold immediately in a flagging housing market. Obviously, it's because the doorknobs are out of date! And if you're going to plop down half a million dollars, $70 for new paint and doorknobs is out of the question. And as an owner, you're clearly too stupid to do it yourself! Only reality television can can save your sale.

Sell This House invites a busty hostess and her musclebound gay designer into the homes of the desperate, to remove any trace of evidence that anyone has ever lived there. Hidden cameras are set up to observe what potential buyers think of the place. Without fail, the would-be buyers complain about the color of the paint, age of the doorknobs, the amount of stuff the owners have collected over the years, the fact that there's dirt on the lawn, oxygen in the air, etc. This is all used as evidence to convince the sellers to let Chesty LaRue and Muscles McBearGroin destroy years of memories. Let the fun begin?

Chesty and Muscles strip out anything personal in a home, like an insatiable tag-team black hole of persona-suck. Bye-bye photos, collectibles, even furniture... In the episode we saw, Muscles said the dining room chairs were creating clutter, and removed them. Now the sellers have to stand to eat. Curtains are also a bad thing. It's always better to tear an old bedsheet apart and drape the remains up on an unadorned spray-painted rod. And who needs artwork when you can take sticks out of the lawn and put them into a crappy vase? Can't Muscles just do one single room without putting some sticks in a vase and calling it "design"? I have sincere doubts as to his gayness. Real gay men would slap the crap out of him for doing this to people, and aesthetics in general.

When the house is painted completely pastel (to "open it up") and all of the electronics, chairs, art and tables removed (to "open it up") and there's no soul left (to "open it up"), the work is done.

Total cost of tearing everything out and tossing it into a woodchipper? About $70. The cost of lost emotions, treasured souvenirs, and essentially the lives and humanity of the owners? Priceless.

God, this show makes me bitter.