What does a TV critic watch when he’s on vacation? For this TV critic, the answers are (1) the upcoming Backyardigans movie Tale of the Mighty Knights, which was in heavy rotation on the portable DVD player during a roundtrip car journey to Michigan, and which, in the estimation of Tuned In Jr. Jr., is the greatest movie of all time, and (2) a lot of HGTV.
So it was that last night I caught the debut of Sleep on It, the heavily promoted real-estate show in which potential buyers pull an overnighter at a house they’re considering. If you watch HGTV at all, you’ve been seeing the commercial, in which a real estate agent puts pressure on a shopper to the tune of Meat Loaf’s Paradise by the Dashboard Light. (The real estate agent, in this case, is metaphorically trying to do to the buyer what young Mr. Loaf was trying to do to his teenage girlfriend in Paradise.) There’s a full-length version of the musical commercial at HGTV’s website, in case the 30-second version is not excruciating enough for you.
As for the show itself, it’s another step in HGTV’s increasing recognition of the shift from a housing sellers’ market to a buyers’ market; but like a good stockbroker, the network knows how to make money whether the market’s going up or down. Its earlier real estate shows were premised on the idea of competitive shopping in a housing market where you had to move fast if you were lucky enough to spend far more than you could afford for a house. Their titles tended to be along the lines of House Hunters or My House Is Worth What? or Make an Offer Now, Goddamnit! Watching a House Hunters rerun from the olden days of, say, 2006 is like opening a time capsule from a forgotten era or turbocharged housing prices and bidding wars.
With Sleep on It, HGTV is clearly recognizing a shift in the market in which buyers have the power and the luxury to be choosy. Of course, HGTV knows that the bulk of its audience is made up of homeowners, who can only take so much depressing news about the housing market–so it’s not surprising that the first couple profiled on Sleep on It decided to pull the trigger despite the house’s high price and poorly designed bathroom. But as I wrote in this column last year, good TV programmers know how to turn anxiety into high ratings, and it looks like HGTV is ready for subprime time.