Changing Properties: The Makeover Show Crosses the Atlantic

Abstract

By 2003 it Was Fast Becoming Clear That makeover logic was the driving force of U.S. reality television, with the promise of “total transformation” providing an effective bridge between the ordinary faces and the extraordinary frameworks that make up the recipe of reality TV. In a sense, the makeover is a recognizable format in a country where the dream of self-invention has narrativized new-world colonization since the seventeenth century, where literature from Twain to Dreiser to Fitzgerald has been consumed with the heady rise and sometimes spectacular fall of American Dreamers, and where the “before-and-after” sales pitch of popular magazines is forever paired in the cultural imaginary with a sand-covered, beached weakling badly in need of a chest-expander. Seen from the perspective of a shorter, television-specific history, however, many of the makeover shows that began appearing on U.S. cable channels in the early 2000s were initially direct British imports and later formats purchased from the United Kingdom where “lifestyle” programming met property consciousness in the mid-1990s and produced shows such as Home Front and the greatly popular Changing Rooms.¹ As this imported form went native in the United States, moving from cable to network channels, it underwent a shift in the object to be made over: from making over property to making over people, or from the material wares of lifestyle to the intimate wares of selfhood.