Since the 1980s, the show has developed into a multiplatform media powerhouse. The surge of interest allowed This Old House to vault into the primary PBS lineup a year later, where it has remained ever since. But it struck a chord with viewers, almost 250,000 of whom tuned in every week to watch the titular house- a Victorian in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood-undergo its gradual metamorphosis. That first, 13-episode season from 1979 initially seemed to be a Boston-area curiosity, accessible only to local residents via WGBH. When This Old House launched, it didn’t look like the progenitor of a new genre of TV. This Old House keeps them at the forefront of the action, perhaps realizing that, without them, there’d be no action at all. The show is fairly unusual among home-renovation programs in allowing workers like Eastman to speak at length and explain their craft to a national audience.
What could’ve been framed as a melodramatic battle of the wills is instead presented as a teachable moment between the tradesman and the homeowner. The scene is quintessential This Old House.
“I personally wouldn’t want anything on the surface, but code is code and we have to have it,” he says. The homeowner, Sunil, isn’t enthused about the prospect of disrupting the clean lines of the counter with pop-ups, but he takes a sensible view of the matter. The building code mandates that outlets should be placed every few feet, but O’Connor clarifies the problem for the audience, asking, “Where do you put an outlet when there’s no wall?” The supervising electrician, Heath Eastman, devises an ingenious solution: He conceals the outlets in receptacles that can be pressed down into the countertop.
In a recent episode, the crew is briefly flummoxed over where to install electrical outlets in a modern, minimalist kitchen that has prioritized windows over usable wall space. On This Old House, workers solve technical problems that seldom merit a mention on programs of the HGTV variety. Its chief goal is, as it always has been, to put skilled tradespeople and the work they do in front of the camera. This Old House, meanwhile, has no single star and little concern for dramatic narrative arcs. These newer programs often unfold like reality TV–esque hero’s journeys, with the hosts figuring as creative geniuses who marshal old or otherwise sad houses through a rapid-fire rehabilitation and beautification process. All the same, it can be difficult to locate the similarities between This Old House and its descendants. Without it, viewers might never have gotten Property Brothers, or Fixer Upper, or probably even House Hunters International. In one of the rare, subtle signs that four decades have passed, Silva appears to be wearing an Apple Watch in a recent episode.Įvery program on HGTV arguably owes its existence to This Old House, which first turned home renovation and real estate into television. Each episode still zeroes in on a few elements of home construction, such as installing a skylight or shoring up a foundation.
The look and feel of the series hasn’t changed much since its debut in February 1979.
The cast-headed up by the master carpenter Norm Abram and rounded out by the contractor Tom Silva, gardener Roger Cook, plumber Richard Trethewey, and host Kevin O’Connor-returns autumn after autumn, as consistently as uncles you might see every year at Thanksgiving dinner. Now in its 40th season, the PBS home-improvement show This Old House feels like the TV equivalent of New England clam chowder: hearty, wholesome, and old-school.