When Home Improvement Is Self-Improvement

These are times of primal screams. Sociologists talk about the widespread loneliness that has settled into the fragile spaces of Americans’ lives; the winter of 2022, with its compounding crises, has brought a new acuity to the isolation. Burnouts and breaking points are now part of journalism’s vernacular, the frustrations they’ve brought sharpened by the sense of what might have been in their place. Where there might have been solidarity, there is solitude. Where there might have been people coming together to help one another, there is instead, for many, an empty echo: You’re on your own.

Pop culture, always ready to alchemize anxiety into entertainment, has been weaving that sense of abandonment into its stories. Scripted TV series—, , , and many others—are telling timely tales of people forced to fend for themselves. But reality TV, too, is grappling with this moment of ambient isolation. Take, for example, a new crop of shows from HGTV, the network that has spent years flipping real estate into breezy escapism. stars a “home-renovation coach” who helps people fix both their house and their mindset. has a similar premise; so does . finds the celebrity designer swooping in, godmother-like, to aid clients whose problems, as she puts it, “are bigger than bad floorplans.”