A screwball property: Love It or List It as postfeminist realty TV

Introduction

Love It or List It (LIOLI, Big Coat Productions, Canada, 2008–) is a popular reality property franchise that airs on the W Network ¹ and Home and Garden Television (HGTV) in Canada, and elsewhere. The premise of the original Toronto-based LIOLI is a competition between designer Hilary Farr and realtor David Visentin who each want the homeowners they encounter to ‘love’ or ‘list’ their homes. The original programme adeptly blends elements from a variety of media genres, especially the screwball comedy and the documentary. The LIOLI franchise has also demonstrated its success by adapting in myriad ways – from moving shooting locations and changing hosts to selling franchise formats worldwide. It is the contention of this article that the popularity of the franchise overall is largely due to its unique ‘value proposition’, as a generic hybrid realty programme that invites co-viewership.

I will analyse an episode from the Toronto-based LIOLI: Season 5, Episode 7, ‘Matt and Kelly’ (2012) in which the genre–gender relationship of the programme is best realized. ² I will be paying particular attention to the blend of genres and performances by the hosts and the homeowners to demonstrate that LIOLI is able to appeal to many audiences and critical appetites simultaneously. The programme’s adaptive use of Hollywood’s screwball genre makes it an especially apt test case for untangling the complex interplay among contemporary and historical media discourses within home renovation, design and property television.

Screwball comedy was a popular, mainly American film genre in the 1930s and is defined by The Oxford Companion to Film as having ‘irreverent humour, vernacular dialogue, fast pace, and eccentric characters’ (p. 621). The plots of such stories are carried by the lopsided dynamic between a smart-talking woman and a bumbling or overly rational man. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), for example, is a notable classic of this genre. The female protagonist dominates the male protagonist through dialogue, which is full of puns and irony he fails to understand. Her superior wit, physical grace and wry observations challenge his masculinity, but the playful and cheeky nature of the interaction, which is on equal footing, puts both parties in an elaborate courtship ritual. They must overcome obstacles to be together, but we never doubt that a happy ending is ahead.

Furthermore, in the inter-war, post-Production Code era of Hollywood (policy drafted in 1930), screwball comedies became a ‘safe’ place to deal with risqué topics. Several authors, for example, have claimed that the verbal sparring common to the main protagonists amounts to sex without sex, a sublimated battle of the sexes (Leff and Simmonds, 2001; Gehring, 2002). Think of Mae West, an autonomous – or scandalous, depending on your point of view – actor of the period, who provided a well-known model for using irony to convey sexual innuendo and female sexual subjectivity in this period. ³ By contrast, Kathryn Hepburn, arguably the doyenne of the screwball comedy, pitched this tendency in a less overtly sexual direction but with the woman still firmly in charge of the gender dynamic.

Much has been made of the ‘fantasy elements’ of 1930s screwball comedies of Hollywood; whether in terms of the female autonomy they depict or their utter avoidance of the economically eviscerated time in which they circulated, these films existed in stark contrast to the life and times of most Americans. The lavish homes and carefree lifestyles that the screwball characters inhabit, and the powerful, ‘zany’ screwball female protagonist represent economic and social fantasies that recall a more luxurious time past or optimistically anticipate the good life promised by American New Deal policies. I refer to these specific historical, economic and cultural contexts because the Great Depression and the screwball comedy have a strong resonance with events of the more recent past: the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008 and the resulting Great Recession of 2008–2010. If the manner of representation of the home and women’s place within it are similarly in flux in both periods, what can we learn by looking to property television for insights into the current cultural zeitgeist. And, what exactly are Canadian creators/executive producers of LIOLI Maria Armstrong and Catherine Fogarty doing by invoking a bygone American film genre and mixing it with the realty drama?

‘It’s not about the house’

Has the love affair with your home hit a roadblock?

Should you start seeing other houses?

Can you love your home again, or will you list it?

Opening voice-over of Love It or List It (2008–)

Using irony to convey double meanings is clearly not new to television, but until LIOLI this has rarely been a feature of reality-based property programming. Instead, we are more likely to encounter undiluted affect brought to viewers through large doses of melodrama, with shows such as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (2003–2012) providing only the most obvious example. By contrast, LIOLI borrows rhetoric ripped from romance and self-help, tabloid TV, and delivers it deadpan. The somewhat androgynous voice-over wryly welcomes us to LIOLI, a world where the family depicted over the opening credits is faced with the stressful choice between whether to stay after their home renovation is completed or whether to move on and create ‘new memories’ elsewhere.

More than just an amusing opener, however, ironically delivering and mixing the conventional terms of romance/self-help with property television invites viewers to consider what the two genres might actually have in common, if anything at all. The question driving LIOLI’s version of realty television becomes whether the powder room or the partner is the real cause of problems in the home, and as with all home improvement television, on LIOLI the decision to love it or list it is ultimately one of transformation and self-improvement. But LIOLI questions the basis of other property shows by both downplaying the drama through irony and upping it considerably elsewhere. On lifestyle television generally, ‘doing better’ is often depicted as a conflation among life’s most important aspects: home, romance and work. One distinction between design and renovation shows (lifestyle) and property or realty television (‘reality’) is that the latter is more heavily dramatized and conventionally, the problems of home are linked with interpersonal conflicts. But whether the disputes are indeed personal, economic or industrial, the source of these tensions is often more about the meanings we assign to the home – the burden of representation that it bears, and its increasingly common signifier as a form of neoliberal self-care – rather than anything inherently dramatic about the house itself.

Is home a sanctuary for inhabitants, a warm and fuzzy shelter? Or, is a house just a physical structure – a cold and calculated investment or a debt instrument? Is home for profit or pleasure, or both? Judging by depictions on property television, sentiments associated with the home are practically infinite, and as with other reality television, these ‘feelings’ are designed to extract the greatest dramatic impact to drive the consumption of products placed within the shows or advertised during the commercial breaks. While we may marvel at the number of ways in which the televised home can function as the locus of so many (non)dramas, on LIOLI the home becomes a lightning rod for expectations and anxieties about modern middle-class life as it links romantic, economic and domestic dramas. But the mix of screwball, documentary, high drama and home ownership creates an experience that is by turns deadly repetitive, unexpectedly visceral, playfully critical and genuinely serious.

Executive producers Armstrong and Fogarty claim that their show actually came from real-life observation: ‘A couple is breaking up: do they fix up the home for the partner who stays, or should they list it and each start anew?’ (Interview, January 2013). In this interview, they discuss the relationship between lifestyle and reality television, and drama and documentary. Among property and reality television programmes, LIOLI manages to bring all four narrative styles together:

Both agreed that LIOLI viewers are responding to the drama of the family relationship that lay beneath each renovation project, and that the show’s success was due, in part, to ‘unraveling the mystery’ (Armstrong). When it works, the couple falls back in love with their home – and each other – again. When Hilary gets the job done, renovation of the family home offers an opportunity to resolve marital issues, as well as those of space and functionality. ⁴

It is worth noting that in its short history, realty television has rapidly evolved from seeing simple before and after transformations to reality drama. This is perhaps due in part to what David Clifford Giles claims about taste in the home generally: ‘interior décor taste is forever in a state of flux, and discernment is a matter of familiarity with current trends as much as the accumulation of cultural knowledge’ (p. 605). ⁵ But shifting aesthetics alone could not stabilize viewers’ appetite for realty television when the economy tanked and the housing market crashed at the end of 2008. The Toronto property-show producers we interviewed explained that, from that point, the simple how-to renovation and decorating show had run its course. Home renovation and design shows that actively glorified and fetishized home objects were considered to be, at the very least, in poor taste. ⁶ Some Canadian producers who had been exporting their shows to the United States halted production on 2009 shows because the real-estate collapse made it ‘uncomfortable’ (and unprofitable) to create design or realty shows that celebrated a ‘splendor of the home’ (Interview, October 2014).

In the dire financial landscape of 2008, it is perhaps not surprising that LIOLI benefitted from ‘good’ timing, and that the producers were eventually able to negotiate off-screen relationships with other networks that capitalized on the blurred relationships between home as shelter and home as investment on-screen that the show depicts. Relationship issues and house issues, which are linked together in the opening voiceover, obscure the real home crisis of foreclosure and are replaced (or displaced) by the fantasy elements of the screwball comedy genre. But how do we escape when it is to the ‘halcyon days’ of the Great Depression with the spectacle of the home represented in Hollywood movies existing in stark contrast to the poverty outside the movie theatre? As the screwball in its way registered ambivalence towards the luxe life it depicted by skewing the power to the woman from the otherwise male-dominated gender dynamism of Hollywood, LIOLI both reifies and questions the modern home’s increasingly common status as an instrument of neoliberal capitalism by offering the home up as sanctuary and ‘ladder’ simultaneously. LIOLI, like others of the realty genre, calls up our complicated associations with home, heterosexual coupledom and family by making cultural references that viewers are familiar with; those that resonate historically with the home genres of cinema, radio and, of course, with television itself.

For example, while the opening voiceover dramatizes intimate relationships by incorporating the vernacular of the confessional talk show, it does so by displacing the inhabitants’ relationship angst onto the bricks and mortar of the home. The question of whether to ‘love it’ or ‘list it’ becomes an implicit commentary on the fleeting nature of the modern marriage relationship: should this be fixed or can I do better elsewhere? On LIOLI, resolving the ‘flow’ or ‘structure’ of the home is explicitly deemed responsible for repairing faulty relationships. As such, the home becomes the central signifier of romance, doubling the obfuscation of the cultural and economic context of the show’s inauguration in 2008 and its cultural reference point to the past.

Matt and Kelly: perfectly normative

Property and renovation television fundamentally follows the trials and tribulations of homeowners as they endure the ultimate house transformation. The realty television formula that LIOLI adopts typically depends on three conventions: a wish list, three house choices and a ‘reveal’ of their renovated home. In the afore-mentioned LIOLI 5(7) featuring Matt and Kelly, the opening begins in long shot in the midst of their tense conversation as they walk along a residential street (Figure 1). This is followed by the ‘canned’ title sequence in which Hilary and David are featured pushing very large animated words. Hilary is on the left of the screen pushing a big pink LOVE sign, and David is on the right with a big blue LIST sign and he is struggling. A cut back to Hilary reveals that she has taken a seat on her ‘word’ yet David, oblivious to this fact, continues to push (Figures 2 to 5). The tension between both ‘couples’ has been introduced, though its source is obviously very different.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Love It or List It, Episode 5 (7). Kelly and Matt discuss the dilemma of ‘loving’ or ‘listing’ their home. Image reproduced with permission of Big Coat Productions, 2015.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Opening Credits. Introducing the screwball ‘couple’, Hilary Farr and Davd Visentin. Image reproduced with permission of Big Coat Productions, 2015.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Designer Hilary, wants you to LOVE it. Image reproduced with permission of Big Coat Productions, 2015.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Realtor David wants you to LIST it, but like the male protagonist of the screwball comedy, he doesn’t fully appreciate what he’s up against. Image reproduced with permission of Big Coat Productions, 2015.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Unbeknownst to David, the ever-confident Hilary relaxes while he struggles. Image reproduced with permission of Big Coat Productions, 2015.

The programme progresses by alternating between the couples, their challenges and wish lists, until the four of them meet up in a local restaurant to discuss the details. In this episode, unlike others, David and Hilary meet close to the main artery near Matt and Kelly’s row house rather than in front of their home. Hilary is looking around and marvelling aloud at the vibrancy of this trendy urban neighbourhood. As David arrives, he wonders why she is so enthralled by the destruction of property that writing on a side of a building bespeaks. Hilary starts to explain that you just do not see work like this anymore (as she looks admiringly at the brick building’s fretwork, we get a close up of it), but David interjects that it is ‘just a bunch of graffiti’. Undaunted, Hilary claims that David simply does not appreciate the graffiti because he does not understand what it means. David, gullible as ever, asks, ‘Well, so, what does it say?’ In response to the obvious tagging, Hilary claims it reads, ‘Hilary is great’. Exasperated, David retorts somewhat uncertainly, ‘It doesn’t say that’. To which Hilary replies, ‘You’re just no fun’.

Next, Hilary and David make their way to Matt and Kelly’s home. Again, Hilary marvels at the charm of the Victorian row house, while David suggests that it is too cramped and he will find them something better. They pause briefly in the dining room where letters to the words L’Ultima Cena (The Last Supper) are affixed to the wall. David reads this aloud and asks, ‘what is that Latin or something?’ to which Hilary responds, ‘yeah, for “you’re screwed.”’ This banter continues throughout the tour of the home where Hilary claims in a variety of ways that charm and the feeling of an older home are sometimes more important to people than pure functionality and spaciousness, which she will improve in any case so they really do not have to give up anything. But what is also established is the fact that they each look at the same objects and see — or claim to see — very different things. With the ironic possibilities opened up between both couples, the line of domestic reasoning continues in the restaurant ‘must haves’ battle between Matt and Kelly and their ‘interview’ for the camera. Here, Kelly talks about the circumstances of their original purchase and the fact that they now have three kids. She argues that there simply is not enough usable space and the home does not function well for her busy domestic and work life. ‘And that’, she says, ‘is why we have to leave. NOW’. Matt retorts, ‘Oooor fix it!’ Kelly is the one of the few homeowners to ever address the unseen and unheard interviewer directly by saying, ‘See? This is what happens. This is what I mean. This optimism! It’s … grating!’ Neither of them looks directly into the lens, but in medium close-up, Kelly often mugs for the camera, and making faces signals both her disagreement with Matt and becomes a disarming self-authentication of her own behaviour.

In contrast to many of the homeowners featured on LIOLI, both she and Matt have well-developed senses of irony that complement the exchanges between Hilary and David, yet both also come off as natural, serious and sincere. For example, when Kelly refers to herself as a caricature of womanhood, she says, ‘I get pissy with the kids and I blame the house for that … I don’t want to be the nagging wife’, to which Matt replies, ‘Well maybe you should be!’ This acknowledgement of ‘the type’ disarms any criticism of the performance of what Kelly refers to as ‘crotchey’, that is, femininity. While LIOLI does not abide by any strict gendered division of labour within or outside the home, the show nonetheless references stereotypes of male and female behaviour as though to signal to the audience that these are the conventions with which viewers are familiar, but based on the number of unconventional relationships depicted, cumulatively suggest that they do not necessarily reflect what people actually do. Yet this is also a disarming tactic: for example, Kelly’s ‘bitchiness’ is permitted – even valorized – because it is later appropriately pitched as the authentic response of a mother to the physical discomfort and ultimate safety of her children.

On LIOLI, many men want to stay in the current house (as is the case with Matt), and some men are identified formally as caregivers, and the latter is treated independently of their wish to love or list their home. Later in this episode, however, Matt is found wanting as ‘protector of the family’ because he has failed to reveal that he knew the roof rafters of the home were charred in a fire prior to when he and Kelly began living there. So LIOLI, like home improvement television shows before them, expects him to perform this manly task. ⁷ Meanwhile, Kelly’s persona teeters on the edge of exasperated though amusing, cajoling and a bit cranky. There are numerous times throughout the programme when the dialogue is bleeped to cover her swearing. No such examples of Matt occur. Is it that he simply does not seem to use expletives, or is Matt like David in the sense that he is no match for Kelly’s or Hilary’s verbal dexterity?

Moments of disappointment and exasperation build in every episode to the one scene that occurs when the frustration of the homeowners reaches its peak and the gender play seems the least staged. In every case, the couple will have ther backs to the camera and are walking away from their house (and the viewer), which recalls and then extends the brief moment from the opening sequence. Visual access is limited, and a jerky, racking focus on long shot heightens the suggestion that we are eavesdropping on a private conversation with domestic consequences. Open microphones, which render the audio portion clear and unmistakable, suggest a dilemma of such magnitude that the homeowners seemingly forgot they were being filmed. This ‘reality’ of the moment is confirmed when we also hear the bleeping out of Kelly’s mild expletives, which we have heard before throughout the show. In this instance, we might expect to feel awkward about the blatant voyeurism. Instead, the surveillance is normalized by authenticating the drama as a truly unscripted moment. ⁸ As the couple discusses their disappointment at Hilary – as though the unforeseen problems are ‘the last straw’ and her fault – they agree to reconsider David’s housing options.

Much like with some relationships, the property genre can become deadly repetitive. So too is the case with the convention adopted in every episode of LIOLI mentioned above. One of the ways producers resolve the issue of ‘same-old, same-old’ is to create programming that not only evokes current and long-standing cultural values associated with home but also pairs them with genres and idioms from other media that have been linked with the home. It is in this way that changes to the décor or the relationship can be swapped like so much wallpaper in one’s life. Because LIOLI mixes in numerous generic references gleaned from other television, film and literary examples, its formula goes well beyond Todd Gitlin’s 1979 insight that television’s recombinant style is largely responsible for both its formulaic and ideological success. ⁹ It is given that viewers have at least a passing understanding of the tropes of historic literary, cinematic and television genres. Contemporary genres are sometimes marked by practices of desaturation, revision, revival and ‘staging’ that inform current reception contexts. LIOLI creates a postfeminist, neoliberal recombinant style of its own, which is a pastiche drawn from tabloid self-help, romance, the gothic, observational documentary, and most identifiably, the screwball comedy. Yet while each LIOLI episode predictably pits designer Hilary Farr against realtor David Visentin and each joins ideological forces with the home-loving and home-listing owner, respectively, as in the screwball comedy, the story is based on a battle of incompatible wills. Kelli Marshall explains,

In screwball comedies, we move formulaically from an incompatible relationship between two mismatched lovers to a hostile relationship between two ideal lovers, and from a moment of romance with the screwball couple to a period when they are separated. Ultimately, we are granted a happy ending. (p. 14)

By doubling the stakes between the hosts and the homeowners, LIOLI amplifies the intensity of the opposition and complicates the loyalties in keeping with sometimes farcical events common to both the screwball comedy and the comedy of remarriage, such as The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) and Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, 1949), in which a divorced couple finds their way back together following a series of ludicrous mishaps. David Shumway says the romance (or relationship) that links the screwball comedy to the comedy of remarriage ‘is more than simple illusion and more than a genre; it is a complex and tenacious ideology’ (p. 384). Its aim, he suggests, is paradoxical to construct romance and mystify marriage simultaneously.

The screwball and remarriage comedies, therefore, perform the cultural and ideological work of reassuring viewers about choosing marriage over desire, and they always end in complete about-faces: one partner changes his or her mind at the last moment and rushes headlong into marital bliss. So, too, is the road to happiness on LIOLI. The dream home, like the ideal mate, proves to be more elusive than the clients imagine at the outset. The search is never simple. Every dwelling has its shortcomings. Unexpected twists and turns plague both the renovation project and the hunt for a new house. Sometimes your enemy is your ally, and your ally is your enemy. And even the most trenchant home lover or leaver changes her or his mind at the moment of decision, which ends each episode. This screwball effect – switching course as the couple are heading home (plate) – is a familiar strategy of the screwball and even some of the property shows, but the two are rarely placed together.

As David Shumway suggests, the romance of the screwball comedy depends not just on desire being rekindled on an ongoing basis but also on the couple’s ‘isolation from the claims of everyday life’ (p. 471). The home therefore becomes an oasis for romance and affection, and in LIOLI the home itself is romanticized just as being at home must seem to be both reassuringly separate from the concerns of the everyday world and exciting in its own right. Creating the balance between intimacy for the clients and at a distance for viewers, LIOLI warms its audience up to the home-related merchandise for sale from its advertisers.

As Shumway claims, ‘One reason that screwball comedies always involve the rich is that their world is a metaphor for the reward that romance promises of love’ (p. 467). Stanley Cavell explains, ‘luxury is essentially an expression of eroticism’ (in Shumway, 1995: 471). The desire does not end with each episode since Hilary and David restage the love affair over and over again with each new home-owning couple they meet. A renovation might be stressful and exhausting, but it injects the home with a new desire and renews the marriage – along with the plumbing and hardwood floors.

Andrew Bergman (1972) characterizes the ideological nature of the screwball comedy as follows:

They created an America of perfect unity: all classes as one, the rural-urban divide breached, love and decency and neighborliness ascendant … the comic technique … became a means of unifying what had been splintered and divided. Their ‘whackiness’ cemented social classes and broken marriages; personal relations were smoothed and social discontent quieted. (p. 4)

For LIOLI, this is a win–win situation. Audiences get to see the romance replayed with slight variations but with a reassuringly happy ending. For the homeowners, keeping their home with improved function and design is usually the smartest financial and emotional choice. For advertisers, the show offers another opportunity to commodify the home. This reciprocal stage creates the sense of ‘participatory interactivity’ (Andrejevic, 80–81), which, in turn, drives consumption of shelter culture goods and services offered on a variety of media platforms but especially from within one home to another via television.

Popularized in the United States during the 1930s Great Depression, the screwball comedy is also a genre of surveillance, if only insofar as we are privy to the gender play between the lead couple. Conventionally filmed in medium shot and medium close-ups, except when providing a peek at the luxurious setting, this style provides spectators with a sense of proximity, all the better to carefully scrutinize the developing relationship between the smart-talking female lead and her somewhat hapless soon-to-be mate. In the process, we are treated to a visually and aurally dynamic gender comedy that is based on the contrasts between the protagonists; she: wisecracking, witty and graceful; he: tongue-tied, inept and lumbering.

Likewise, LIOLI’s interior designer Hilary Farr is the bold and smart-talking, worldly woman with the mid-Atlantic accent, and realtor David Visentin is her bumbling, sub-urban male foil. They are locked in a sparring match of professional skills. As with the screwball couple, the juxtaposition of these hosts with their mismatched personae and divergent means for how to resolve the family’s housing problems, as well as the ironic tone of their interaction, provide opportunities to draw attention to contradiction and formula. We may know that the decision to love or list implicitly frames a happy ending, but the irony expressed in mocking verbal exchanges between Hilary and David also underscores the performance and production aspects of the show.

Because LIOLI thrives on conflict and rapid shifts in the narrative trajectory and emotional temperature, this can have unexpected consequences, but these are mainly contained within the formula. Emphasizing the clashes – among the production team, between Hilary and David, within the couple’s differing desires to stay or go, and the ongoing disclosure of problems within the home throughout the renovation – might reveal the disparity in social and economic access to power, but it does not encourage it. Specifically, these contradictions provide key opportunities to examine the gendered and classed performances on LIOLI. More often than not, we are invited in as viewers to enjoy the postfeminist screwball discourse that the show provides through these exchanges among the players, neither of which is wholly critical nor celebratory of the consumer home. We are invited to occupy a certain kind of distance from the homeowners and directed to be critical of their bad manners and unreasonable demands but not to examine a world that values the currency of house beautiful over anything else. ¹⁰

Paired with the elements of the screwball comedy interaction between Hilary and David are ‘caught-on-camera’ observational documentary aspects of the show that capture private moments between the home-owning couple. Variations in these modes of address – interviews and staged confrontations – also contribute to the wide-ranging emotional temperature of the programme. The discord between the homeowner couple is revealed by the ‘surveillance technologies’ of the portable microphone pack and the telephoto lens, which exist in sharp contrast to the aesthetics of the screwball. This style is both distant and intimate, and it conveys to viewers that this is a privileged moment, yet this treatment of the image also tends to flatten it, and without a tripod to steady the image, the shakiness of the hand-held camera is doubly pronounced. This by-now familiar faux low-tech strategy tends to create intimacy at a distance; that is, at a safe remove from the messy reality the camera captures, but at the same time making us aware of our surreptitious gaze. LIOLI’s surveillance of the homeowner couples’ gender dynamic loosely woven into the screwball comedy’s gender dynamic underscores observation and its uniquely contradictory position in contemporary society as both everyday surveillance and the sanctioned violation of privacy that is voyeurism.

At its root, then, the realty sub-genre, like other reality television genres, manages surveillance and display where private and public moments are carefully doled out to create the strongest impact. Mark Andrejevic (2004) has argued that the pervasiveness of surveillance technology has normalized the practices of watching and of being watched. Consumer involvement in surveillance culture is virtually guaranteed whether from closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, retail sales tracking or personal disclosures on social media. This normalization of surveillance has been crucial to the ongoing success of reality and realty television. The tools of watching have created a consumer appetite for looking. The social practice of knowing more than we should is as much ideological now as it is technological. Participation in surveillance-performance practices for the camera has optimized the panoptic gaze. ‘As one producer told us, audiences want more “reality,” ¹¹ and surveillance or snooping continues to be a major draw’. ‘You know people. At the end of the day [viewers] just want to see into each other’s houses, and a lot of our shows are just doing that’ (Interview, 2014). In order to renew the thrill of voyeurism, LIOLI juxtaposes the stylistic strategies of the two least compatible genres: documentary and screwball comedy.

Property and renovation television generally not only offers surveillance of the home and its problems but it also creates an opportunity for performance by the principal characters, including the hosts (often a contractor or realtor) and the homeowners. Meshing public and private lives on television has always been a carefully managed ideological and economic endeavour. Yet, according to Joe Moran, the home owes ‘its cultural and emotional power to its capacity to separate itself ideologically from the public spaces of everyday life’ (quoted in McElroy, 2008: 44). Success of the property and renovation genre in part at least occurs thanks to invasive surveillance of the most private arena of peoples’ lives. On LIOLI, as the home itself becomes a symbol of the couple’s relationship, each episode offers an opportunity to scrutinize gender competency in the place where it is most commonly practised but least on public display. Genres assist in our access to the gender story by both heightening the felt relationship to the ‘reality’ and irony of the performances.

Realty reality

So far I have been suggesting that the conflict between the homeowners, mirrored by the comedic hosts, creates a hybrid rom-com/screwball-documentary and forms the basis of LIOLI. The differing styles of observation that the genres adopt are part of a postfeminist televisual discourse that gives something critical with one hand, while it takes away something else with the other. Michael Keane and Albert Moran (2008) distinction between ‘genre’ and ‘format’ based on the transformation of literary texts to the television industry’s effective pastiche of formulas may be useful to our understanding of LIOLI. As with past criticisms of film and television genres reproducing social and ideological relations and offering little more to audiences than a way of life to imitate, their approach implicitly diminishes the capacity for viewers to tease out unforeseen critical pleasures that may occur in one franchise format and not another. ¹² I would argue, instead, that critical pleasure depends on how you look and where you look. Not all production contexts are the same, nor do all reality television programmes do the same thing. Even within the LIOLI franchise universe, Hilary and David are very different from Jillian and Todd, or Kirstie and Phil, yet each couple evokes comparisons to the rom-com/screwball/chick flick couples of Hollywood – whether of yesteryear or today.

According to Keane and Moran, the differences between format and genre suggest we will somehow find less of import or cultural value if we look closely at the format structure and function of reality television than say that of literature. More compelling is Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood’s (2012) use of the concept of ‘engines’, which Keane and Moran debate, as a structuring device for mapping out televisual intimacies (85–86). In this case, I would claim that the appropriation of film genres and reality TV blends, and the cultural savvy of viewers enable them to read the generic hybrid and access the pleasure of seeing a woman in charge, notwithstanding the commoditized, postfeminist terms under which we view all this.

C.D. Giles argues that on design and property shows, ‘men are expected to provide the means, women to use their taste and discretion in making the choice’ (Craik, in Giles, 2002: 611–612). In LIOLI, those lines are less clear, and it begins with the show’s stars. Management of gender dynamics is central to the competition of LIOLI. On one side, is the beautiful Can-Brit, Hilary Farr, whose plummy accent and composure under all circumstances situate her as vaguely ‘above it all’. Her quick wit, sassy retorts and $7.1 M net worth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Farr) make her a worthy competitor for her real-estate counterpart. David Visentin, by contrast, is a second-generation Italian–Canadian real-estate agent who is able to hype – without blushing – the most so-so sub-urban homes. In his classic-casual attire, David projects a likable image of success, although he, too, boasts a sizable net worth of $4.2 M (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Visentin). He is not exactly the beast to Hilary’s beauty but he is definitely more Fred Astaire than Cary Grant, or precisely, the sympathetic Spencer Tracy stooge to Katharine Hepburn’s independent and capable modern woman.

The gender lines established by Hilary and David are elastic, but the show frequently prompts gendered performances of the homeowner couple’s own relationship with each other and with their home. Negotiations about unforeseen problems in the renovation, which invariably result in Hilary removing a project from the couples’ wish list, always provoke a heated response. Tempers also flare each time David shows the couple a home outside their preferred neighbourhood or beyond their price. Frequently, the couple’s response not only conforms to heteronormative conventions (independent of the couple’s sexuality) but it also challenges them surprisingly often. Sometimes, for example, the male partner is more attached to the home and memories it holds than what we might expect. Conversely in several episodes, the female partner, who is the main breadwinner, expresses ennui at the problems the house poses for her stay-at-home-husband.

Such gendered performances offer viewers a glimpse inside the couple’s conflict-resolution style, and they heighten the desire and drama associated with fixing or finding their dream home. The fact that both partners in the marriage perform affective labour in the home helps to ensure that LIOLI remains a top-rated show. It handles the dynamics of gender in such a deft and appealing manner that it is wildly popular with both male and female audiences. The viewer numbers indicate that it has one of the most desirable demographics, the upwardly mobile ‘bridge’ demographic described as an ongoing 19–34 and 35–54 -year-old male and female audience. ¹³ How-to decorating and house repair and improvement shows typically do not succeed with dual audiences. Financial Times London, however, says that property television, which offers more personal and comprehensive involvement with the home, attract combined male and female audiences (Norwood, 2011). Why is this market so important? Not only are women and men both watching the show, but also they are watching it together, creating what is known as the [advertising] ‘sweet spot’. The impact and value of advertising increase when two people live together and talk to each other about what they are watching.

It is notable that the majority of the producers we interviewed between January 2013 and September 2014 are women. All were well educated with at least one post-secondary degree and many years experience in the television or film business. One of our original questions had to do with feminist practices or policies, even informally, in their production models. All of the women claimed to be feminists, but when pressed beyond the progressive production working environment of reasonable work hours and a good benefits package, they were loath to address what might be considered feminist content on their shows. Feminism, they claimed, does not sell. ¹⁴ But I would suggest, in fact, that it does. LIOLI might not be an example of a overtly critical or high-brow genre, but with its post-2008 context, it is very much in keeping with the Depression-era comedies that help scrutinize and negotiate new economic and gender realities.

Conclusion

In saying many things to many people, LIOLI does what Heather Gilmour (1998) claims of the comedy of remarriage:

Part of the appeal of Hollywood’s comedies of remarriage is that they seem to escape tautological explanation. These films reflect on the Depression economy, marriage, gender, even sex, while refusing to take a neat stand on any thing. It’s not that the films aren’t saying any thing about these issues, it’s that they are saying too much. (p. 26)

The connection to contemporary culture is also part of LIOLI’s slipperiness; the meeting of several genre conventions encourages more open readings of reality television. When Hillary Rodham Clinton reported to The New York Times that she finds the show ‘calming’, it is not surprising why. ¹⁵ It is reassuring to see a woman in charge, if only on television. LIOLI – the Toronto version at least – offers viewers a rather more complex package of gender and genre dynamism than most format and realty programmes that are simply reassuring to mature, middle-class women. By mining the relationship between observational documentary – a Canadian tradition – and a historic American genre, the screwball viewers can derive much more than open concept design tips from LIOLI. Although ‘cheap’ and generically pliable realty television, LIOLI offers uncanny opportunities to imagine the relationship between gender, genre and property in historically continuous ways.

As June Deery (2015) has argued compellingly, ‘the political effects [of reality television] are largely indirect, non-deterministic and hegemonic’(150). On one hand, all the LIOLI franchises adopt a fairly straightforward formula, which is a good-humoured competition between the designer and the realtor where the loser buys the winner a drink. ¹⁶ On the other hand, the programme subjects are serious as they concern the intersection of gender, class and shelter. Postfeminism is defined by the confluence of the material and ideological mainstreaming of second wave of feminism, which involves the effacement of class, and the entrenchment of neoliberal politics. ¹⁷ When these values are read or are placed together in screwball realty television, one effect is to complicate the performance of gender in the home. In this way, Love It or List It negotiates the latent politics that inform its contemporary cultural context. It does so through the ‘ideologically casual’ and ‘commercially serious’ (G Turner cited in Deery) means provided by reality television.