I Want My HGTV

My name is Ellen M. and I’m addicted to HGTV.

If you haven’t channel-surfed lately, or your cable company doesn’t offer it, I’m talking about Home & Garden Television--20 1/2 hours a day, every day, of programs devoted to architecture, gardening, building, remodeling, home repairs, decorating, crafts and entertaining.

My addiction began during a recent, protracted cold when I was stuck in bed, too sick to read, not too sick to watch TV. It began harmlessly enough. A tour of a Pennsylvania farmhouse here, a segment on steel-frame homes there.

Even in an antihistamine haze, I learned how to place rocks in a Japanese garden, mix fertilizers in a Cuisinart, spot authentic Meissen porcelain.

The haze lifted. My need for HGTV did not. I began clicking between two channels. During “Today” show commercials, I checked in on the pros and cons of vinyl siding. When “NYPD Blue” got a little predictable, I clicked into a tour of Savannah homes.

Suddenly, Must-See TV paled in comparison to Design at Nine.

I entered an evangelical phase. I called my cousin Linda in New York. Yes, she said, she knew all about HGTV and used the word “addiction” first, and in reference to herself. We spent a glorious hour comparing favorite shows. Then I phoned my friend Karen in Ohio, to learn that her 15-year-old, football player son is hooked too.

I am not alone.

HGTV went on the air in December 1994 and has gone from being available in 6 million homes to 38 million.

“We’re the fastest growing cable station in the U.S.,” said Burton Jablin, senior vice president of programming and production. “We’re going like gangbusters.”

In Southern California, HGTV is carried by 43 cable companies, including Media One and Tele-Communications Inc. Since March 31, the network has been available to Century Cable subscribers in West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, bringing it to a total of 2.4 million homes in Southern California. The network is owned by E.W. Scripps Co., which also owns the Food Network.

With the exception of “This Old House Classics,” “The Victory Garden” and “New Yankee Workshop”, all the programming is original.

HGTV has production companies all over the country and, as word catches on, has no dearth of gardeners and decorators proposing new shows.

Several shows are produced in Los Angeles, including “At Home With” and “Homes Across America,” produced by Cinetel Productions; “Awesome Interiors,” “Kitty Bartholomew: You’re Home,” “Party at Home” and “Simply Quilts”, but I hear a lot of drawls, twangs and Canadian diphthongs these days.

And I’m not turned off by shows that extol mud rooms and double-glazed windows and forsythia bushes; I find them exotic. I’d be bored with too much palm tree and patio programming.

Each week, episodes are shown several times (the prime-time shows twice in one night). But then they are retired and won’t be seen again for three to six months. Some programs have a large inventory (craft maven Carol Duvall does 65 shows a year and has 300 shows in inventory).

“The toughest aspect of programming is making sure we appeal to every level and geography,” Jablin said.

HGTV does seem to have something for everyone: first apartment budgeteers, home buyers, remodelers and those seeking “wish fulfillment,” Jablin’s term for homes and gardens most of us can only drool over.

HGTV has 14 building and remodeling programs, 15 decorating and design shows, 14 on gardening and landscaping, five on crafts and hobbies and 12 miscellaneous ones (wine, pets, etc.).

A sampling:

“Location! Location! Location!” is devoted to real estate: how to house hunt, dealing with credit problems. Sometimes the advice is a little simplistic.

“Extreme Homes” features people living, for example, in an old school house, terradome (a postmodern sod house) and a spaceship-esque structure in the middle of Iowa.

“Before & After” tackles a major home remodeling job in each episode. The project unfolds through time-lapse photography.

“Awesome Interiors” is aimed at twentysomethings with cool (their word), budget-driven decorating. One semi-makeover cost $80.

“Surprise Gardener” features Shelley Taylor Morgan and her crew of dozens making over some lucky family’s yard in one day. Yes, one day.

There’s a cumulative effect to watching these shows so much. The number of ways to paint walls is staggering, and next time I tackle a wall-painting project I don’t know if I’ll be able to make a decision among speckling, sponging, stenciling, ragging, rubber stamping, even reconfiguring paint rollers to give a plaid effect.

I am not equally smitten with all the programs, which is a good thing or my life would come to a complete halt. (The early morning hiatus for infomercials and the nightly encore performances of prime-time shows also helps me keep a grip on reality.)

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My particular addictions include “Decorating Cents,” in which Joan Steffend redecorates a room for under $500 (not counting labor, which is considerable on most projects). She takes some pretty drab rooms and spiffs them up. Red paint on the walls goes a long way, visually, as they say in HGTV circles.

On one show Steffend and a guest decorator redecorated the living room of an 81-year-old woman, Annie, who’d been in her apartment for 46 years; it was dullsville.

For $506 they made significant changes that managed to be eye-catching to both me and Annie. This was truly a real-life project.

I find “At the Auction” hypnotic. Host Leslie Hindman, whose Chicago auction house was recently bought by Sotheby’s, has dazzled me with her amazing store of knowledge.

She’ll talk about why tea caddies have locks, show viewers a fine example of one and then take us into the auction itself, the cameramen struggling to capture every bidder. Sometimes the bidding is heart-stopping and goes well beyond what Hindman has estimated.

I’ve learned how to tell a lithograph from an etching, how to repair a leather-topped desk, why George III furniture is usually mahogany. Her voice may be an octave too high, but she’s still one of my faves.

“Home Front,” one of the trendy shows, specializes in London design. Part of one decorating make-over included gluing hot pink Yeti fur on a cabinet and candy i-luv-u hearts around a mirror.

My favorite gardening show is “A Gardener’s Diary.” Horticulturalist Erica Glasener spends a leisurely visit with gardeners all over the country.

My favorite episode so far: a vegetable garden outside Santa Fe that grows unusual produce for local restaurants.

The series was the brainchild of a group of Atlanta women, all garden writers, who went to HGTV’s Knoxville headquarters to pitch the idea of Glasener, a sister Atlantan, doing garden tours.

No one in the group had any experience producing a TV show, nor had the proposed host ever been before the camera, but the company took the risk and got a big hit in return.

However, the days of a group of novices selling a program to HGTV are over. “We’ve had to put a moratorium on new ideas,” Jablin said. When they resume talking, they will listen only to production companies with track records.

I’ve noticed that many HGTV shows are sponsored by paint companies and hardware chains, and other companies with an interest in getting America puttering around the house. Jablin says that doesn’t affect programming.

“We have a strict separation, although in the beginning, advertisers put a lot of pressure on us. They didn’t understand. Now they do.” The shows I’ve seen they have been circumspect about product placement. I haven’t seen any Dutch Boy paint cans in “Room by Room,” a show it sponsors. In fact, walls are just as likely to be covered in wallpaper as painted.

Many companies in the home crafts and decorating field have staff experts who appear on programs to demonstrate the cleverest uses of Velcro, for example, or rubber stamps. This doesn’t bother me because I’m too busy being amazed at what they’ve come up with.

With HGTV, relevance to your life means nothing. I will never landscape my own Japanese garden or install a new sink. And not having a backyard deck didn’t stop me from watching as “The House Doctor” replaced a dry-rotted section of wood deck.

I’ve begun to suspect my grasp on reality may be slipping, post-HGTV. Since I’ve been spending so much time gazing at bloom-bursting gardens, state-of-the-art kitchens (oh, the refrigerators I’ve seen) and Biedermeier furniture, I seem to have forgotten that I really don’t live like that.

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Ellen Melinkoff is a Los Angeles freelance writer.