Dynamist Blog

TRADING SPACES

After a book-writing hiatus, I've returned to D Magazine, with a column> on the cult cable show, "Trading Spaces." The column necessarily has a Dallas-area angle, but it's really about the show's broader appeal, and it hits many themes I develop in The Substance of Style:

Whether clad in brick, stucco, or clapboard, ...today's standard suburban houses almost never appear on TV. To producers in New York and Los Angeles, where one-bedroom apartments and two-bedroom bungalows sell for several times the price of a Texas ping-pong-ball house, a place like Plano is as exotic as a Survivor locale.

Trading Spaces is different. Nearly every home on the show is a large, relatively new box of innocuously off-white rooms, many of them with ceilings that vault up at odd angles. Here, as nowhere else on television, suburban families can see people like them in houses like theirs.

Between 3 million and 6 million viewers watch each episode, making Trading Spaces one of cable's biggest draws. Now in its third season, the show runs every weekday afternoon and several times on weekends. I first tuned in as research for a book I was writing on the increasing importance of aesthetics in economic and cultural life. But, like millions of other Americans, I quickly became addicted.

Read it all here. (I will eventually post it in this site as well, but it's free for now at DMagazine.com, which also has some interesting articles on deadly oysters and what Dallas cops think.)

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