HGTV Builds Upon Home-Show Craze

Blame it on Tim Taylor. ABC’s “Home Improvement” may have ended its eight-year run, but in real life there seems to be no slowing the craze for all things domestic.

Blame it too on Russell Morash. Two decades ago, he decided to make a TV series about the work going on at his Massachusetts home. “This Old House,” which just started its 21st season on PBS, is the oldest show of its kind.

It also has spawned numerous home-renovation series. There are now enough of them to warrant an entire cable network, Home & Garden Television (HGTV), which airs both new series and reruns, including “This Old House.”

Morash is modest about acknowledging that his good idea launched what seems like a thousand shows with titles such as “Hometime,” “Home Again,” “About Your House,” “Gimme Shelter” and “Handyma’am.”

“To be statesmanlike here, when we started out it was very difficult to do this kind of television, because in those days we used a much different kit of equipment,” he said. “You had cameras that didn’t work like those today, and it was a big deal to take this equipment into the field. But now technology has made it easy from a technical standpoint.”

Editing in those days, Morash said, meant cutting the video with razor blades and patching it with cellophane tape. Now, home improvement shows can be made much more efficiently--and affordably--by using mobile lighting, multiple cameras and wireless microphones, as well as sophisticated editing machines.

“The other part of it is that the shows are inherently interesting because they are very visual,” said Morash, who also produced Julia Child’s cooking shows.

Former seasons of “This Old House” air on HGTV, along with “The New Yankee Workshop” and “Victory Garden,” all produced and directed by Morash. Although these PBS shows have “primed the pump” for the home-show craze, he said, HGTV offers much more than repeats.

On HGTV, viewers can aspire to be their own interior decorators or home sellers, or stick with smaller tasks such as turning an old vase into a lamp or planting a winter window box. If this cable channel does not have the cachet of “Martha Stewart Living,” it has broader ambitions. The numbers indicate that the interest in home shows is growing: HGTV, launched in 1994, is now in about 57 million homes.