I commonly run into a problem on Netflix in that I can't find anything on there for the most part that is going to hold my interest. They really are losing this battle with their competitors that are consistently coming up with inventive and well-funded series that just blow them away. However, Netflix is the only subscription streaming service that I have a membership for so unless I am going to download a series based on a recommendation of someone else, I don't have much choice but to peruse what they have on offer.
Recently I tore through a number of series and didn't find much good to say about them until I landed on this show, which I find to be well-crafted and obviously massively funded.
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There are a lot of home makeover shows that are out there but none that are even remotely as ambitious as this one. The premise is that they totally revitalize a family's house without them even knowing about it. In order to pull this off they have a friend or family member who agrees to get them out of the house without the family knowing about it for exactly 12 hours. In that very small window of opportunity the team of designers along with 200 or more workers will go in and completely renovate the house and make it dramatically better than it was before.
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Some of the undertakings are situations that would otherwise take days to accomplish on their own such as this add-on to an attic room where the son had moved to the upstairs makeshift bedroom in order to accommodate his ailing mother who he gave the ground floor bedroom to. The window had to be moved in by helicopter because there was "no other way" to get it in there. I seriously doubt that this is actually true and they only did it for dramatic purposes but it was exciting nonetheless.
This is an impressive undertaking for anyone that has ever tried to do so much of a house refurb even doing as little as painting a room. The change happens moments after the family leaves the property and a team of movers comes in to move all of their belongings out temporarily while they completely change the furniture, paint, and in most cases make structural changes to the building. When I was young we had a carpeting team come in to install floors to our basement rec-room one year and it took them several days just to accomplish this. Doing that and many more things in just 12 hours is extremely impressive to me.
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The design team takes months of preparation getting the house ready with plans before they even see the place and this leads to problems that they have to deal with on the fly. Even though they have 12 hours before the family comes home, little things like breaking the one and presumably only attic window they had to import from Poland is not something they can just run out and get another one of. At least that is the way that they present it and even though a lot of it seems staged, it's still quite entertaining.
Now there is one problem with the show that I think anyone who watches more than just a few episodes is going to notice right away and thus far it has appeared in every single episode that I've watched. The team will do a "trial run" on a demo version of something they intend to do to the house and things always go terribly wrong. One example would be where they are attempting to transport an add-on to the house that will be an attached bathroom so of course the damn thing falls apart during the pretend transport. This is intended to add tension to the 12-hour makeover and every time they get it done right in the nick of time.
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The plans are huge!
The other thing that always happens is that there is always a phone call made to the host Danielle about how the family is coming home early even though they promised to keep them out until 7pm. This creates more tension as we are lead to believe that the family is en-route and the build is not done. Of course they always do, in fact, get it done and we, the audience is meant to believe that they only just finished it moments before the family arrives back. This would be plausible if it only happened once but since it happens in every single episode, normally resulting in the family returning 15-30 minutes early, it is quite obvious that it is staged.
Should I watch it?
I think a lot of my opinion about this is based on the fact that there really isn't that much to choose from on Netflix right now but whether or not that is the case doesn't really matter that much. Aside from the repeat elements that they force into every episode I find the things that they do to be entertaining enough to hold my interest. Did I walk around the room doing other things while it was on? Sure I did and I think other people will as well. You already know the end result of the episodes because if they failed they wouldn't air it.
I do think that since you factor in that each of these rebuilds must cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the showmakers are giving this away to families that are doing good for their communities, that this is a show that you should support even if it does have some lazy forced tension in it. The tears that inevitably flow from the families' eyes is pretty touching at the end of the episodes and thus far no one has complained about a bunch of strangers totally rebuilding their house without their permission. Now that would be an episode that I would really want to watch.
It isn't perfect and some of the hosts are downright annoying, but overall it is good enough to watch, especially considering the mountain of crap that is a majority of the Netflix library at the moment.
