RIVAL HAUNTED HOUSES

Trading Spaces

Season 8 (2008)

When I was in high school one of my greatest pleasures was coming home from school and watching Trading Spaces.  And yes, clearly I was very, very popular in high school.  This was during the show’s golden age, when it was at its peak (though I proudly count my fandom all the way back to the Alex McLeod days, before she was replaced with professional perky person Paige Davis).  Back in the day Trading Spaces was truly part of the zeitgeist, spawning books and spin-off shows and starting the whole HGTV interior decorating reality show craze that persists to this day.  Despite it’s one-time popularity, the show is almost impossible to find in syndication.  I managed to TIVO a handful of reruns from some random channel shortly before it stopped airing them altogether.  Much to my delight this included a Halloween-themed episode!

The quality of the episodes always varied greatly on which designers happened to be appearing, and I am sad to report that my personal favorite, Hildi Santo-Tomas, does not appear in “Rival Haunted Houses.”  Besides having a name that’s very fun to say out loud, Hildi was known for having the most daring designs, such as gluing dried moss all over someone’s walls.  She was also known for not really giving a fuck about the homeowner’s personal preferences.  She was/is amazing.  I wish she had been one of the two designers in this episode just so I could continue to write about her.  I may need to start a separate blog just for this purpose. 

Anyhoo, the designers that do appear are Frank, the extremely gay yet inexplicably married to a woman Country Time Santa Claus, and some other guy named Goil I’d never seen before.  Frank and Goil team up with two sets of neighbors who swap houses and decorate a room in each other’s houses.  The couples are both really into Halloween and every year try and outdo one another with their decorations.  Ordinarily this would be a great premise except that this episode was clearly filmed in the summer, so instead of lavish Halloween yard displays and autumnal foliage we get sunshine, green lawns and the neighbors half-heartedly dragging out their Halloween decorations for the sake of the cameras.

Another missed opportunity is that instead of just designing walk-through haunted mazes the designers and couples actually redecorate a real room with only minor Halloween touches.  I think I have established by now that when I watch a holiday episode I want full-on holiday, not some black and white wallpaper with a subtle bat pattern!  Goil does design an unintentionally hideous “monster” made of pillowcases or something for the homeowner’s kids to use as a sort of beanbag chair but that’s about it.

The most Halloweeny thing about the episode is that the designers, carpenters and host Paige Davis all wear costumes throughout.  Paige has some lame get-up as “the Goddess of Time” (since her job is to monitor the time.  Get it?!).  One of the carpenters has a pretty elaborate Satan-serial killer outfit and mask, and I admit that it was a bit fun to watch Satan making shelves out of reclaimed barn wood.  The couples also don costumes for the room reveals, but watching two disco dancers cry over how much they love their new paint color isn’t as enthralling as it may sound.

As you can tell I was disappointed by the lack of Halloween elements, but I suppose they deserve some credit just for trying.  Really I was just happy to be watching Trading Spaces again and remembering the good ole days of homeowners who refused to do their nightly “homework” (usually painting), bickering designers and the Earth-bound goddess that is Hilidi Santo-Tomas.

Halloween Quotient: 2

See It, Skip It, Own It?

Skippable.

VALENTINE'S DAY

Jon & Kate Plus 8
Season 3 (2008)

This month I used some Christmas cash to buy the first three seasons of Jon & Kate Plus 8 on DVD.  Nick was okay with it once he learned each season only cost around $3 and therefore Kate Gosselin wouldn’t be profiting much from my shopping spree (if spending $6 counts as a spree).  This Valentine’s Day episode comes from the show’s third season, meaning it’s pre-divorce, pre-Kate on Dancing with the Stars, pre-everything is horrible.   The kids are very young and unaffected and Jon and Kate are only gently bickering, as opposed to engaging in outright warfare.  

During the course of the episode Jon and Kate represent the two opposing views of Valentine’s Day.  Jon thinks it’s a fake holiday invented by greeting card companies.  He waits until Valentine’s Day itself to go out and buy Kate a present, which he “wraps” in the car.  He also throws a tantrum when she asks him to wear a festive tee-shirt.  “It’s a medium!” he yells in disgust before hurling the shirt on the ground.  Knowing the cheating, lawsuits and acrimony that lie just a couple of years ahead, the image of the discarded “I Love Kate” tee-shirt on the floor seems more than a little prescient.  Plus it really bothers me that the shirt actually reads “I Heart Love Kate” and therefore makes no sense.

I Heart Love You Too

Kate, on the other hands, goes all out for the holiday in a way that I can only admire.  She decorates, puts together little gift bags for the kids, and proudly wears her “I Heart Love Jon” shirt.  She also themes all of the kids' food, making heart-shaped pancakes, heart-shaped grilled cheese and even cutting cucumbers into hearts.  I am a sucker for themed holiday food of any kind, so I highly approve.  

Heart-Shaped Grilled Cheese & Cucumbers for 6

Kate also creates edible Play-Doh for the kids (the one kid that tries to eat everything also tries to eat paper hearts at one point) and organizes a scavenger hunt in the house.  Every single thing seen and done in this episode is somehow themed to the holiday, thanks to Kate’s efforts, and this is a pre-fame version of Kate that’s quite likeable.  She seems to be doing everything to genuinely make a nice holiday for her kids, as opposed to doing it for the sake of the cameras.  This truly is the show at its peak, and by the next season it would all start to grow tainted by fame, money and out-of-control egos.

While decorating, it's best to coordinate one's outfit with the paper cut-outs

I know a lot of you are probably more sympathetic to Jon’s view of Valentine’s Day as a sort of bullshit holiday, but I of course am all for it. And I say that as someone who actually worked at a greeting card store for a couple of years and witnessed the hordes of last-minute husbands and boyfriends, like Jon in this episode, desperately buying whatever they could lay their hands on to alleviate the romantic pressure.  But I believe that we need Valentine’s Day to break up the doldrums of February and rather than ignore it, I agree with Kate in trying to make it even more of a big deal than it already is, replete with decorations and themed food and outfits.  As Kate says in this episode, it’s all about love-- whether that’s love for your kids, your soon-to-be-ex husband, or simply the holiday itself.

Recurring Themes: Jon runs out to the mall and does some Last Minute Shopping (which is also a Christmas trope!).

Valentine’s Day Quotient: 5

See It, Skip It, Own It?
This is a charming episode and chockfull of Valentine’s goodness.  Watch and enjoy!

A VERY BOO CHRISTMAS

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo
(2013)

I apologize for my lack of posts this past week but living takes precedence over blogging, so since flying home for the holidays I’ve been spending my time wrapping, eating, socializing, decorating and enjoying the holidays.  But never fear!  I’ve also been busy watching lots of Christmas movies and TV.  Along with the usual favorites I’ve been mixing in some new shows, including this TLC special.  

A lot of digital ink has already been spilled over the pros and cons of this controversial show.  I haven’t watched it much but I’ve always found it surprisingly fun and a not-very-guilty guilty pleasure.  This Christmas special reinforced my sense that in terms of the reality TV wasteland you could do a heck of a lot worse than the Boo Boo clan.  Give me Mama June and her brood over the Kardashians any day of the week.  They may be crude and feed into some of our worst voyeuristic tendencies but their family dynamic seems rooted in a genuine spirit of love and togetherness.

This hour-long special packs in a lot of Christmas activities for the Thompson family.  Some seem more staged than others but the Christmas quotient is high regardless.  They decorate their tree (only to have their pet rooster knock it over), go shopping at the flea market, ice skate and decorate their front yard for their annual toy and canned food drive.  
As Mama June carefully points out several times the family was doing the charity event years before the cameras started rolling.  

Santa and Elvis go together like peanut butter & bananas

The charity event involves lots of lights and inflatable snowmen, with patriarch Sugar Bear dressing like Santa Claus and Honey Boo Boo dressing like Elvis.  When a visiting child asks her why Elvis she replies “Because I’m Santa’s helper,” as if that somehow explains it.  It’s genuinely touching when the family drops off an impressive amount of donated toys to the charity organizer and Mama June explains that they were inspired to help after being recipients themselves during some lean times. 

Another favorite scene of mine involved Alana (aka Honey Boo Boo) shopping at the flea market, where each family member was given ten dollars to buy presents (had the TLC paychecks not come in yet or was this just a reenactment of Christmas budgets past for the camera’s sake?)  Alana shops just like a normal kid, in that she ends up buying the most bizarre present possible for her father: two mannequin heads that hairdressers use to practice on.  The gift is charming in its sheer randomness and in both this scene and throughout the episode Alana comes across as a pretty normal kid, despite the cameras and craziness around her.

Sugar Bear + Mistletoe

Later the family preps for Christmas Eve, which includes leaving out cheese balls for Santa’s reindeer.  Alana seems to still believe in Santa, or at least is gamely playing along, but her Christmas Eve excitement is palpable.  On Christmas morning the family opens their gifts along with their Uncle Poodle.  Openly gay, HIV positive and hailing from the Deep South, Uncle Poodle certainly provides a much-needed alternative representation of gay life.  The family’s easy acceptance of Uncle Poodle is another positive aspect of this much-maligned show.  

When writing about Here Comes Honey Boo Boo it’s hard to avoid getting into the many social and cultural questions it raises, and hard not to take a stance either for or against it (though clearly I lean towards supporting it, or at least not condemning it).  In terms of sheer Christmas enjoyment however, this episode is a win.  It’s funny, chockfull of holiday cheer and appeals to someone like me, who likes nothing more than watching people’s home movies of opening Christmas presents on YouTube.  I can’t resist a peek into people’s lives and houses come Christmas time and seeing how everyone celebrates the holiday both differently and yet somehow the same.

Alana cradles a decorative Baby Jesus. Let the outrage ensue!

Christmas Quotient: 4

See It, Skip It, Own It?
If you’re looking for a late in the game dose of Christmas cheer you could do a lot worse than this surprisingly charming special!  I say see it and enjoy!

HALLOWEEN

Quints by Surprise

Season 3 (2011)

I’ve already written about my fondness for Jon & Kate Plus 8 (most of it, anyway) but I’ve always asserted the appeal lay not in the kids but in the personalities of the parents.  That theory has certainly been proven true now that I’ve watched Quints by Surprise, TLC’s tame replacement for the delicious Gosselin train wreck. 

And boy was TLC playing it safe when they cast this show!  After the Jon and Kate implosion they went in the extreme opposite direction, trading bitchery for extreme niceness.  The Bland McBlandersons are the most boring family on television.  Think of the moderately good-looking couple in high school that hung with the popular kids but had zero personalities except for the fact they dated each other steadily and seemed destined for marriage.  Well, they got married, moved to Austin and had quintuplets (plus one other kid).  The end.

Generic Blonde Wife and her slightly Cavemanish Generic Husband spend this episode half-heartedly decorating for Halloween, going to a pumpkin patch and dressing their kids as the characters from The Wizard of Oz before taking them trick-or-treating.  Everything they do in this episode is Halloween-related but everything they do is also mind-numbingly boring so who cares?  Seriously, the most exciting thing that happens in this episode is when one of the quints falls down and bleeds but then is fine.  Ho hum.  I’m not saying I wanted the kid to be permanently injured but I wanted SOMETHING interesting to happen.

Even I am not immune to this level of adorableness

One of the little girls is obsessed with scarecrows, which I thought was a cute little kid thing to be obsessed with.  I was temporarily impressed that the parents were at least going to let two of the girls go as Glinda (one was “Good Witch” and one was “Good Witch Princess”) rather than make them each fulfill a different role but then sure enough the mom brainwashed one of the two Glindas by suggest-ordering her with “You want to be the bad witch, right?”  So much for that brief moment of non-conformity.   

Halloween Quotient: It honestly probably deserves a 3 based on how Halloween-centric it is but I was so bored I’m giving it a 2.

See It, Skip It, Own It?

Skip it and go watch a Jon & Kate Plus 8 Halloween episode (or any episode) instead.

GOSSELINS, GOBLINS & GHOULS

Kate Plus 8 (2010)

I am an unapologetic fan of Jon & Kate Plus 8 and to a lesser degree Kate Gosselin herself, despite her many glaring flaws.  She’s a type of bitchy that I can appreciate and that makes for good TV.  Even I must admit, however, that past the first few seasons the show degenerated into a fame-whoring mess, going from a realistic look at parents navigating the challenges of having eight young kids to a shrill single mom posturing for the cameras.  Unfortunately this episode falls into the latter half, as it was part of a series of specials that came post-divorce.

Kate has replaced Jon with a plastic pumpkin head.  Upgrade?!

Kate is living in the manse, sporting the extensions, manicured nails and fake tan that mark her post-fame transformation.  Any sense of reality is lost as she stops to sign autographs while shopping and when it comes time to decorate the basement she’s helped solely by the camera crew in lieu of a husband, family or friends.  A fair amount of the episode is taken up with non-holiday related things like the return of the family dog.  It gets dull fast; so dull that halfway through Nick elected to go do the dishes rather than watch the rest of the episode.  Now that’s dull!  Despite these flaws, however, there is some Halloween goodness to be found. 

First Kate lives out one of my fantasies by going on a Party City shopping spree, randomly stuffing three carts full of Halloween decorations in order to create a haunted basement for her kids.  Clearly Party City is footing the bill; indeed you get the sense that throughout this episode Kate doesn’t actually pay for anything, whether it’s pumpkins, dog treats or hay rides.  Still it’s fun to watch her navigate the aisles and later return with the kids to pick out costumes amid the usual last-minute costume mob.

Other Halloween highlights include a trip to the pumpkin patch, a game of toilet paper mummy wrapping, a hayride, pumpkin carving and a trick-or-treating finale.  Cara forgoes a costume and goes as “Cara Gosselin” which violates every tenet of Halloween decorum that I value.  She is forever disqualified from Halloween! 

The kids and their costumes.  And Cara.

All of the above scenes are enjoyable but cracks constantly appear to remind the viewer that this family is living anything but an ordinary life.  While on the aforementioned hayride, in one of the episode’s more surreal moments, Kate recalls the very first episode of the show, in which the family also went to a pumpkin patch.  She asks the kids if they remember and they respond by saying that of course they do because it’s all on the tapes. They’ve traded actual memories for taped episodes of their own show. 

Now that’s scary!

This post brought to you by the good people at Party City.

Recurring Themes: Alexis wears the ever-popular Cleopatra Costume while Kate designs a basement Homemade Haunted House for the kids.

Halloween Quotient: It would be a 4 if not for the bloated running time and non-Halloween stuff crammed in, so this rates a 3.

See It, Skip It, Own It?

This episode is up on Netflix so see it if you have the time and can tolerate this tainted version of Kate Gosselin.  Otherwise you can skip it in favor of the superior Season 1 episode “Ten Little Pumpkins.”