TV Land

If you root through the massive pile of paper that is the Sunday New York Times, you will find a magazine called Key. Key is a real estate-focused spinoff of the Times Magazine. Within Key you will find a longish article/essay by me, on the subject of property-related television shows. I’m pretty happy with the way this came out, and while it’s a little long to read online, I hope you’ll take a look one way or another. I really enjoyed writing it. Here’s the start:

What makes a house a home is a topic suitable for poetry. But a house or a home is always something else. It is property. Does this fact contain poetry? Probably not. But it does contain entertainment. It’s a form of television entertainment I’d never paid the slightest bit of attention to until I got involved in buying property myself, which happened right around the time that the long housing boom was unraveling last year. Previously invisible to me, these entertainments were, for months, the only things I wanted to watch. Buying, selling, updating, restoring and “flipping” for quick profits — it all ran together, but I watched even when I couldn’t remember if the title of a certain show was “Flip This House” or “Flip That House.”

It turned out these were two different shows, and with every “pain of U.S. housing slump” headline, the inventory of real estate entertainment looked a little more glutty. It made me ponder this curious genre’s fate….