Let’s dive into this week’s TV OT.
The home improvement programming boom may have started with the likes of the Property Brothers and shiplap savants Chip and Joanna Gaines, but there seem to be more faces than ever striving to be the next kings and queens of the renovation nation. The question: are there any worthy of firing our reigning design duos?
Since a good old-fashioned cage match seems out of the question, we have to discuss this as civilized people with some totally unscientific rankings unilaterally determined by someone whose design aesthetic can best be described as “this slightly broken thing I found at Home Goods.” So an expert.
Disclaimers:
- This is not an exhaustive list as not every design duo is featured on TV, and I haven’t seen it each episode of the shows below. Who has such time? I’ve settled for the random number eight.
- This list only includes people who appear in shows as a duo, which is why you won’t see my beloved Bobby Berk on this list.
- Power rankings are subject to change whenever I feel like it, and no one’s appearance on this list should be taken as a personal endorsement of them. (You never know who the next problem will be.)
6) Ben and Erin Napier (“Home Town”) – I wish this sweet-looking, working-class couple were my neighbors – but they wouldn’t necessarily be my favorite innovators. Our styles just don’t match, and that’s okay. I just remembered an episode so enraged me, I looked it up online later, picked up all the things that annoyed me (e.g., a white-sprayed wrought iron chandelier) and texted them to my sisters. (Obviously this Petty LaBelle was drinking a hater ade cocktail that night.) Look, I’m not always my best self.
5) Lyndsay Lamb and Leslie Davis (“Unsellable Houses”) – Thanks to my mom for reminding me that this show exists, and we enjoy it. I have to admit I didn’t watch this pair as much as some of the others, but what I did see I liked. They have a lot of variety in their style offerings.
4) Jonathan and Drew Scott (“Property Brothers”, “Celebrity IOU”) – It’s hard to rank these home improvement OGs lower because you have to respect those who helped build a genre. That said, one of my annoyances is when homes for families are furnished with furniture that isn’t family-friendly — things with sharp corners or impossible-to-clean textures. (Enjoy your suede sofa for the five minutes it will be clean.) It’s going to leave everyone disappointed. Sometimes these well-meaning guys miss the details.
3) April Brown and Sarah Sklash (“Motel Makeover”) – These ladies aren’t remaking houses in their new Netflix series, but I guess it’s only a matter of time until the women I now call the Terracotta Motel Warriors ( when you look, you will understand why) enter that phase. This show, which premieres on August 25, follows them as they bring life back to a motel – just like they did with their highly popular June Motel – using neon signs, sunset colors and plenty of grit as a battle against the start of the pandemic. . I watched it once and can’t see any more of these female entrepreneurs. Also, someone has to give the immediate green light for a spin-off with their man-of-few-words contractor, Rick, who is understatedly hilarious. (One of the best lines was his review of his very first glass of rosé. “That’s terrible.”)
2) Dave and Jenny Marrs (“Fixer to Fabulous”) – Nothing kills me more than when renovators take an older home with character and turn it into an all-white asylum. This couple does a good job of keeping the unique aspects of older homes intact while renovating, and my gut tells me they would do even more if they didn’t often have modern clients to answer to.
1) Chip and Joanna Gaines (Magnolia Network) – Did you really think I’d dethrone the king and queen of the ambitious alley? Never. Yes, I’m as much about the modern farmhouse look as everyone else is, but if you’ve seen their new show, “Fixer Upper: Welcome Home,” you’d know that this pair has evolved a lot since that 2017 rerun that showed you the other day. The brand seems to have entered a new era that is moving away from the gray boxes and playing much more with textures and shades. Oh, but this era is still shipwrecked. You must have a shiplap.
A ‘dead’ stop? Not so fast
NewsMadura’s Brian Lowry has a message about the final season of ‘The Walking Dead’. He reports:
“‘The Walking Dead’ kicks off its 11th and final season on Sunday, but if you’re thinking about what to wear to the finale party, don’t worry, there’s still plenty of time.
The super-big season will actually be 24 episodes, offering a long time to build up to some sort of conclusion in 2022, though it really won’t be as several spin-offs continue and another has already been announced by AMC. .
The first two episodes don’t feel like building to anything major just yet, though they do present a nice mix of the main characters, with much of the suspense based on the relationship between Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). ), who’s pretty sure she’ll kill him the first chance she gets.
‘The Walking Dead’ has been such an important part of AMC’s lineup that it’s understandable that the network wouldn’t be in a hurry to part with it. But for all the fuss that this is the last season, like the show’s endless supply of zombies, it’s going to be a long, slow hop to the exit.”
Everyone greets the king?
For the Stephen King completetists, Lowry also had this to say about “Chapelwaite”:
“After seeing a seemingly endless stream of Stephen King adaptations — which understandably picked up after ‘It’ — there’s a certain fatigue built into the process. But even then, it’s hard to arouse much enthusiasm for ‘Chapelwaite’ , a series based on King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot,” premiering August 22 on Epix.
Set in the 1850s, Adrien Brody stars (and also produced the miniseries) as a widow of three children who moves into the family’s creepy ancestral home, where creepy things are expected to begin to happen.
Exceptionally bleak, the show wins some points for its Gothic look and atmosphere. But amid a plethora of King adaptations, including recently Apple TV+’s “Lisey’s Story,” and after a preview of the first few hours, if you’ve got the guts for 10 episodes of this, you’re either a really big fan of the author or made of stricter things than I am.”
Non-fiction files
Another one from Lowry, who basically has a PhD in watching documentaries:
HBO has essentially given Spike Lee an open road to romp on New York City and the unfolding crises it has faced this century in ‘NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021,’ a scattered portrait in the first two chapters of the Covid response and the Black Lives Matter movement, featuring interviews with a large and diverse assortment of New York residents, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, whom Lee presses about his relationship with Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Not surprisingly, Lee — who occasionally provides his own commentary, in addition to conducting hundreds of interviews — works in blistering commentary about former President Trump (whom he calls “Agent Orange”), but things aren’t getting much better. cuomo . Among the politicians interviewed are former New York governors, including George Pataki, who calls the arc of Rudy Giuliani’s career “sad.”
The first two episodes, which premiere on Sunday, are honestly a bit all over the place, as Lee tends to do with his documentaries, weaving a dizzying assortment of (some peripherally related) topics. The third, on the other hand, focuses entirely on the September 11 attacks, with the last of the four two-hour chapters to play on the 20th anniversary of those events.
Paw-somewhat uplifting
This week I tried treating my “White Lotus” tom with the literal dog hair and watched Cesar Milan’s new show, “Better Human, Better Dog”. In the series, Milan – known to many from his old “Dog Whisperer” program – tries to draw a line between people’s own emotions and hang-ups and their misbehaving pets.
While I have to admit that this show marries my two favorite subjects — dogs and myself — I will say that the series satisfies the hunger for something warm and fuzzy in much the same way as “Great British Bake-Off” or “Queer Eye.” And just as those shows briefly inspire you to try something new or better for yourself, this one will do the same — even if you end up going back to bribing your unsocialized pandemic pooch with Pringles to behave when visitors come over.
Must watch/will watch
It’s a dilemma I face every weekend, so I’m sharing it with you:
I’ll probably double “My Girl” and “My Girl 2”, which I didn’t know were streaming on Netflix right now, and your girl loves a good cry.
