Last night we watched “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” on ABC.
If you haven’t seen it, Extreme Makeover Home Edition is a great show – some really amazing work gets done for a very deserving family. A great concept.
While watching it I was reminded of the fact that these transformation/renewal shows are big business lately.
Think about it. There are entire networks (TLC, HGTV) devoted to the genre of seeing something old, run down, or just plain ugly (a room, a yard, a house, a wardrobe, a face or body) transformed into something fresh, hip, and beautiful in about an hour (or in real time, between 2-7 days).
There’s something about us that just loves the concept. We want to laugh at the ugliness and marvel at the change. Secretly we all think about our own rooms, or face, or whatever, and dream about how great it would be to have some experts come in and fix it up perfectly in so short a time.
I don’t think its a stretch to see that, on a deeper level, we all sense our need to be made new, and enjoy watching it happen for others.
In reality, of course, change doesn’t work like that.
Change is expensive and takes a lot of time. We want the transformation without the hard work and/or the high cost, and we want it in about 48 hours. But the transformations we see on TV, magnificent as they sometime are, tend to be pretty superficial. And superficial changes are nice, but they aren’t going to satisfy that part of us that yearns most deeply for transformation.