ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 charts how the logics of lifestyle—ordinariness, inspiration, and sociability—were expanded and hybridized with the makeover in the 2000s on TLC’s breakout lifestyle show Trading Spaces. Drawing on press discussions of the show as well as textual analysis of episodes, it shows how Trading Spaces indexed cultural anxieties about middle-class belonging through the ongoing tensions between suburban “blandness” that the show both exposed and transformed, and the uniqueness of the Trading Spaces redesigns that was the result of cable narrowcasting’s push for visual distinction. On the show, the makeover’s unpredictable transformations brought anxieties about housing and belonging into the public eye, anxieties that stemmed from the pressures neoliberalism and postfeminism exerted on nuclear domesticity and on women especially. As lifestyle formats offered a fleeting strategy of maximizing audiences and gaining an edge in the cable industry, they also marked a passing of the viability of the American dream of white, heteronormative suburban home ownership at its most nostalgic and regressive.
