Monday, January 31, 2011

I watched Extreme Makeover Home Edition for the first time and I had some thoughts on that

I'm sorry, I don't mean to keep throwing blog posts out at you like they're beads at Mardi Gras and you're showing me your tits, but I forgot I wanted to talk about Extreme Makeover Home Edition. Now, as I understood it, what they do on this show is go to some especially impoverished family who also happens to do really great things and give them a new house, right? So if you live on $12 a day and you also just happen to be raising 13 Down Syndrome kids and you also started a soup kitchen in your garage, EMHE shows up and builds you a new house and then you cry and everyone cries.

SO last night I watched this show for the first time ever and the focus is on this family where one of the daughters died because she was texting while driving. And so now - I am not kidding about this - now they tow her death car around to schools and talk about not texting and driving. I mean, that's a good message and everything, but it seems a little morbid to me. Plus I don't know how you can text and drive. I can't even text and walk. I'm not a teenage girl, though.

There were so many weird things about this show that it's hard to know where to start. But here are a few:

1. Partway through this show, who shows up? JUSTIN BIEBER. I know, right? What the fuck? He signed a pledge not to text and drive. And then he had the Surviving Daughter and her pals out to NYC to watch him perform. Oddly, the whole episode seemed to be about Justin Bieber. OH he has a movie coming out. So it was basically a long-form ad for his new movie.

2. The family looked like they were doing OK! There were pictures of them on their trip to Turkey! I've never been to Turkey!

3. In their new house, one wall was all decorated up with stuff about not texting and driving. Super morbid! How would you like to be reminded of how your daughter died every day? Like if your brother died of a heart attack and one wall of your house was painted with the words HEART ATTACK or HEART ATTACKS KILL KILL KILL and pictures of hearts and stuff? You'd freak out, right?

4. They got like a life-size bronze statue of a bull and built a BBQ grill into it! And the SMOKE COMES OUT THE BULL'S NOSTRILS!!! SO FUCKING WEIRD.

5. The Wife, who has watched this show in the past, points out that they always do the same thing: they find one thing that someone's interested in and then blow it way way way out of proportion. Like say you happen to mention casually to the EMHE guys that you saw "The Godfather" once and thought it was a pretty good movie. Well, they'll run with that and Ty will go "You know, Jackson or whatever your name is is really into The Godfather! Let's build a Godfather-themed Italian restaurant right into the house!!!!!!"

6. Really, did they run out of single moms who take in tons of kids and raise them? They're all good? Are we down to families whose daughter died while texting and who, coincidentally, could use a new house to keep their shit in when they're not busy jetting off to Turkey?

2 comments:

Tamagosan said...

We were driving down Marine Corps Drive (just throwing that bit o' Guam culture shock in there for you) and we spotted a huge SUV (redundant, perhaps) with what we thought were 4 televisions coming from the ceiling, airplane-style. We really thought this was a trick of the eye, yet after a series of admittedly dangerous driving moves (somewhat of a sport here) we pulled up to said SUV. There were indeed four at-least-six-inch monitors, including one in front of each of the front seats, where the visors would be. Those two in the back for opiate-deprived children, I get, but basically this guy was driving while full-on watching TV. We debated following him for photo proof and general stalker fun, but decided against it, as he turned the wrong way and we're basically lazy.

Stoney said...

Their BBQ sound's eerily familiar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull