ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 discusses the advent of lifestyle on television through the cable channels Home and Garden Television (HGTV) and the Food Network, launched in 1993 and 1994 respectively. Telecommunications deregulation and the underlying turn to neoliberalism in the late 1980s provided the conditions under which lifestyle’s logics became commercially advantageous for the emerging television networks HGTV and the Food Network, which were looking to start cheaply and draw broad audiences. In an era that was increasingly competitive and niche oriented for television producers, lifestyle allowed new networks to hail niche audiences as broadly as possible, in ways that revealed the divisions between how men and women were valued (or not) by advertisers. Lifestyle thus enabled networks to develop audiences in a critical period of expansion, offering formats and appeals that resonated with individual desires to be part of a social world in which food, family, and domestic togetherness mattered in an era of neoliberalism and postfeminism. It is in this era on HGTV and the Food Network that lifestyle media became codified in a set of cultural logics: they elaborated on fantasies of ordinariness, replaced instruction with the more affective and consumerist “inspiration,” and posited small-scale domestic gatherings as the ideal mode of social engagement in an era of diminished expectations for housing, income, and family life. The chapter analyzes a range of programs, including Emeril Live! (1997–2010), Paula’s Home Cooking (2002–2012), This Small Space (1998), Kitchen Design (1995), and Bed and Bath Design (1995).
