Each episode of HGTV’s “Dear Genevieve,” the latest offensive in Genevieve Gorder’s campaign to remodel every home in the United States to suit her personal tastes, begins with a letter from a homeowner. These letters all basically say: We have an interior-design catastrophe that only you are smart enough to fix. And Ms. Gorder and crew show up and redo the offending space.
Watch a few of these adventures in renovation — the first is Thursday — and you may feel like writing Ms. Gorder some letters of your own. You may, for instance, wonder about her pathological bubbliness, first evident in her work on TLC’s “Trading Spaces,” another rip-rooms-apart show, and later on “Town Haul.”
Dear Genevieve: How come you’re so darn cheery in these shows? Whenever I try a home-renovation project, within minutes something goes horribly wrong, and I’m spouting four-letter words. Or, if I hire professionals, they’re surly and slovenly, never cheery.
You may also wonder about some of the choices Ms. Gorder makes, both in which projects she takes on and in what she does with the rooms.
Dear Genevieve: Any chance you could revisit the Osses, that child-filled family in the first episode? A friend and I have a bet: We think their great room, a high-traffic, undifferentiated space that you reapportioned but left still pretty undifferentiated, was just as messy an hour after you and your crew left as it was before you came, because kids will be kids.
Also, about the Mancinis’ kitchen, which you spend a subsequent episode bad-mouthing mercilessly and then gut: it was four times the size of my kitchen, and four times nicer, before you attacked it. So shut up.
But the bigger question you might want to ask Ms. Gorder is: Who is this program for? It’s decidedly not a do-it-yourself show. Though the homeowners are compelled to put in an embarrassing few minutes with a paint brush or floor sander, the work here is primarily done by professionals. And it’s extensive. Which means that anyone who can actually afford to undertake projects like this can also afford a designer to plan them and thus has no need for input from a TV chatterbox.
Sure, there will always be an audience for stuff like this. Plenty of people get a charge out of poking their noses into strangers’ homes. But this already-tired genre (must we endure those orchestrated screams of delight when the finished product is unveiled?) feels vaguely offensive amid the current economic distress. No one here is impoverished, ill or otherwise in need, and cost appears to be no object in these renovations to spaces that already look perfectly livable. Who has the luxury of such indulgences these days?
DEAR GENEVIEVE
HGTV, Thursday afternoon at 1 and 1:30, Eastern and Pacific times; noon and 12:30, Central time.
Genevieve Gorder, host; James Burstall and Nick Rigg, executive producers; Matthew Vafiadis, series producer; Dave Powitz and Jill Roussell, field producers; Russell Fisher, post producer; Amy Quimby, director of original programming, HGTV. Produced by Leopard Films USA.
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