Be-all-you-can-be TV

By now it should be apparent to all but the most oblivious TV watcher: Everything and everyone is subject to a revision.

Whether your goal is to enhance your breasts, your basement or your basic view on life, chances are you’ll find a television show about it. The quintessential couch potato experience -- watching TV -- has become the portal to the ultimate activity: total life conversion.

And the genre is evolving.

Some of the more established shows in this rejuvenated genre are -- like weeds, or “Law & Order” and “CSI” -- spawning offshoots. Where once one “Trading Spaces” was sufficient, this show about teams that do over each other’s homes now has a family spinoff and a week specifically devoted to college students.

But there are bigger changes afoot as the makeover genre spreads. Once again taking inspiration from British reality programs that mix intense personal dramas with how-to tips on topics ranging from homes to hair gel, the latest crop of shows is bringing fresh elements of surprise and are even tweaking long-held assumptions about the human condition. Nothing is off-limits anymore.

Take Shelley, the 22-year-old South London nightclub dancer from dire circumstances who took only 28 days to ride a horse for the first time and become a successful show-jumper, impressing the upper-crusty set in the process, on BBC America’s “Faking It.” The episode wasn’t just about appearance makeovers; it focused on the drama of a young woman trying bravely to reinvent herself.

“People watch, number one, because they love the emotional journey,” says Paul Lee, chief operating officer at BBC America, which has brought British reality-makeover staples like “Changing Rooms” and “What Not to Wear,” as well as “Faking It,” into prime time.

And then, of course, people and homes get redone at the same time. Recently, we’ve seen John, the farm boy in jeans and cowboy boots, living in a bare apartment, remade into a manicured Casanova who actually stops to re-moisturize after making mousse in his redesigned, state-of-the-art kitchen, in Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” The breakout success of that show has earned it two airings on Bravo parent NBC’s “Must-See” Thursday-night lineup, in condensed 30-minute form.

Even scripted shows are getting into the act: FX’s “Nip/Tuck” focuses unflinchingly on the world of plastic surgery, territory also covered on ABC’s prime-time “Extreme Makeovers.”

Lee uses really big words such as “transformation,” “empowerment” and even “democracy” in talking about the shows.

“All our participants enter [the programs] and think, ‘This will be a bit of fun -- for God’s sake it’s just a room,’ ” Lee says. “And then their entire identities are reconstituted, and for many of them it’s an incredible experience.... There’s the moment five moments before the end [of “What Not to Wear”] where it’s not about clothes, where they say, ‘Is this really who I want to be? Who have I lost and can I regain that?’ ”

Here we thought makeover programs were just about whether you should get a you-know-what job, only to find it’s about the reconstitution of people’s identities, a move from physical to metaphysical, all in a 30-minute TV program?

The Cinderella factor

The fact is, the transformation story Lee is talking about -- the magic of being remade into one’s more glamorous, true self -- has universal appeal going back to the Pygmalion myth and Cinderella, and more recently that Cinderella factor helped spark the enormous success of the film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

Talk programs like “The Oprah Winfrey Show” tapped into the Cinderella magic years ago with impromptu makeovers of audience participants who would reveal their new look at the end of the program. And PBS was one of the first to apply this magic to a building with “This Old House,” which debuted in 1979.

The current crop of makeover shows combine the transformation story with the sabotage aspects of “Candid Camera” to come up with programs that are grabbing audiences, to the delight of ratings-focused TV executives. “Trading Spaces,” perhaps the most established in the makeover genre, has garnered some of the highest ratings ever for TLC and attracts an aggregate of 11 million viewers weekly. Now some of the newcomers are upping the action and trying to cash in as well.

Newcomer “Ambush Makeover,” a syndicated show from Fox’s Twentieth Television, follows a team of hyper stylists on a rampage through 26 cities in America, surprising unsuspecting pedestrians with a daylong, impromptu makeover, followed by a climactic “reveal” of the transformed person to friends and families.

“Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” a ratings sensation for the once-obscure Bravo, features an “Avenger”-style team of five fabulous gay men who burst into the apartments and lives of fashion-starved bachelors, providing a complete cultural, physical, social -- and possibly emotional/spiritual -- makeover.

“Date Patrol,” premiering Sept. 20 on TLC, will each week remake a wallflower into someone lucky in love. The coming “Knock First!” on ABC transforms teenagers’ rooms into “cool cribs,” and “Make Room for Baby,” on Discovery Health, does the nursery while Mom’s laboring away at the hospital.

With each of these offerings, viewers are getting “empowered” with tips of the Martha Stewart, “This Old House” variety -- albeit trendier -- brought to them while they sit on the sofa. Viewers can glean makeup, hairstyling and wardrobe tips from “What Not to Wear’s” stylist-to-the-stars Wayne Scot Lukas. They can learn lofty decorating concepts from “Changing Rooms’ ” flamboyant decorator and soon-to-be-host Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, who designed for Buckingham Palace and the Royal Albert Hall before he became a TV designer-for-the-masses.

According to Lee, British television was a few years ahead of the U.S. networks in dealing with dissatisfied viewers, which is one reason why so many new shows and formats are coming from across the Atlantic Ocean.

“Makeovers are something that we tried out in the U.K. a few years ago because our audiences were dwindling. They were saying to us, ‘We’re getting bored of cookie-cutter television.’ It had become such a sausage factory that people were, like, ‘Can I try a different time of meat? ... Surprise me.’ ”

But Lee and other executives, like TLC’s Roger Marmet and Twentieth Television’s Robb Dalton, who also speak about makeover programs in lofty terms, all make clear that the how-to aspect of these programs doesn’t scratch the surface in uncovering their appeal.

Even 17-year-olds Tina and Kim Santos know that. Sitting outside a San Diego strip mall on a recent Saturday night, these twins said they’ve seen every episode of “Trading Spaces” and most episodes of nearly every other makeover program out there, including VH1’s “Rock the House,” which enlists people like Snoop Dogg and Sammy Hagar to redecorate fans’ bedrooms, and MTV’s “Becoming,” which makes over teen fans to look like their favorite music artist.

“We know what not to use with our hair color and eye color,” Kim says. “And what kind of body type you are and what you can wear,” Tina adds. But they quickly get to the larger issue: the transformation magic.

“It’s probably hard [to be a participant] because you have to change,” Kim muses. “But when they change, it turns out being a good thing.”

“And they change personalities,” Tina points out, “They gain self-esteem, it gives them confidence.

“And it’s all for free!” Tina adds enthusiastically.

Not really. Despite appearances, with these programs, nothing is free. Participants pay by offering their bodies and homes as canvas for a TV show, which involves submitting to varying degrees of public humiliation and potential DIY disasters.

Exaltation and humiliation

Viewers’ tolerance for the rude stylists and over-the-top decorators is consistently gauged and redefined on Internet chat boards. “Trading Spaces” designers like Hildi Santo-Tomas and Doug Wilson are routinely insulted for what’s perceived as their penchant for controversial, dramatic designs at the expense of the neighbors. Neither do “What Not to Wear’s” Scot Lukas and co-host Stacy London escape judgment. On the program’s official chat board last month, “ajaneb” wrote, “The[y] are flat out rude, tactless and the most shallow people I have ever seen. And if you ask me I think they need a makeover. That guy [Scot Lukas] has got to cut the ‘80s rock hair.”

Scot Lukas and London somehow fail to keep pace with the BBC’s popular British pair, Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, on the British version of the program, possibly because they lack the British knack for unself-conscious cruelty. Also, it appears that the legendary rudeness of Constantine and Woodall is a result of their being remarkably invested in the success of their participant of the week. When they resort to telling a participant she looks like a cow, or mocking a male guest by asking him what bra size he is, it appears to be because they want so desperately to release their participant’s true self from the prison of bad fashion and, in doing so, create the Cinderella effect.

Of course the very specter of humiliation -- a reality television staple -- is yet another reason for these programs’ appeal.

“There’s no question that it satisfies certain sadistic desires, watching people made uncomfortable,” says Armond Aserinsky, an avid watcher of makeover programs.

This interest in watching the breaking down of a participant -- even if followed by a rebuilding -- may also explain the advent of British programs that haven’t made their way across the Atlantic, such as “The Dinner Party Inspectors” and “How Clean Is Your House?”

“Faking It” demonstrates what happens when a makeover program is stripped down to the transformation story alone. Participants leave home for an intensive training course (four weeks on the BBC version, just three on TLC’s) in something very different from what they’re trained to do, and in an unfamiliar setting. The stories have included a male ballet dancer becoming a boxer, a small-town vicar becoming a used-car salesman and a burger-flipper becoming a haute cuisine chef.

In each episode, the participants are routinely broken down, humiliated and put to an ultimate test from which they emerge transformed, from the inside out. Or do they?

In one recent episode, Lisa, a drugstore cashier from a small Yorkshire town, was successfully remade into a posh, West London society girl, and the modern-day Eliza Doolittle’s social skills, as well as her personal identity, were put to a painful test against the backdrop of Britain’s centuries-old, immovable class system. She emerged victorious, fooling most of the men in the aristocratic crowd at a posh dinner party. But unlike George Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle, the Cinderella of folklore, or the Galatea of Greek myth, it turned out the transformation made her miserable. Although she fooled most of the judges, she was eager to return to her rural life and family in a nowhere northern town with what remained of her identity.

Maybe that will be the inspiration for the next wave: After makeovers, it could be make-back.