Renovation Saturation

Is House Rules too self aware for it’s own good?

‘House Rules’ started last night on the seven network, joining a long line of renovation shows that has come before it. Going up against heavyweight ‘The Block’, the ratings grabbing ‘Makeover Week’ on ‘The Biggest Loser’ (you could argue another type of renovation) and the overbearingness of ‘The Voice’, ‘House Rules’ failed to make an impression with ratings of only 800,000 nationally.

Taking away the focus on the ratings though, which these days is a very tough environment, and what do we have left? ‘House Rules’ is made by the same production company as ‘My Kitchen Rules’ (maybe they believe the key to success is to have the word ‘Rules’ in the title?) but the high gloss of Seven productions is showing it’s cracks here. The format is fine. Six couples take turns to renovate each others houses with the eventual winner getting their mortgage paid off. It’s simple enough to be engaging and have conflict and emotion.The problem is ‘House Rules’ is struggling under the weight of renovation tropes that have come before it.

The show has a painful focus on voice over narration, signposting any type of conflict that may occur, whilst dramatic music warns us of any comments made that may come back to bite them later on. All this is standard these days, but ‘House Rules’ is an example of an issue of reality contestants occurring more this year on Australian TV than ever before.

Reality show contestants have always known they are being filmed, and have changed their behaviour accordingly. The characters on America’s first reality show ‘An American Family’ in the 1960's were famously chastised for the change in their behaviour on the show. Recently, with the success of ‘The Block’, any other character to come on a show such as Ten’s ‘The Renovators’ or here on ‘House Rules’ act like they want to be on ‘The Block’ instead.

In the first episode the characters are sizing each other up. Clearly the producers want to create an atmosphere such as ‘My Kitchen Rules’ where teams collide with each other - creating protagonistic and antagonistic alliances. These characters though, wanting to be on ‘The Block’ are too busy creating tension between each other to worry about the other teams at all.

‘The Block’ is a successful format because they take a very large show and make it feel like an intimate one. The characters on the show feel fully rounded and much screen time is spent ‘getting to know’ them. Sets are made small (think of Scottie’s results room) and challenges are done on a ridiculously small scale.

The mistake of ‘The Renovators’ is they did the very channel ten angle of making the show feel Very Big. Big warehouses, complicated challenges and too many contestants turned the show into a unweildly monster. ‘House Rules’ feels like it is making the mistake of wanting their characters to be too simplistic, reducing them to stereotypes like what is done on MKR.

The biggest problem with the show at this stage though is that it is just boring. The stakes are too low within the show to hold viewer interest for very long at all. Will this be corrected quickly enough to save the show at this point? Tune in next time to find out.