Response to TV Show Viewers: Post 1 - January 23, 2026
Response to TV Show Viewers: Post 41 - April 23, 2026
To use the
word reluctant, rather than openly admitting my fears, would soften things up
to make the mishandling of my opportunity to be on TV different than I should. Without
a doubt, I was in a precarious position because I’d moved ahead with the
networks without having clear, spelled out plans, or at the least, some form of
vague parameters on what we were moving ahead with together spelled out in a
documented form.
My handling,
or lack of, might be an example of the warning about not meeting your heroes. I
revered HGTV and that created a weak spot in my ability to evaluate circumstances.
That’s an excuse I’m willing to own.
Big
picture, looking ahead down the long road, and even now in hindsight, sticking
with our thought out and talked over planning would have been better for all involved—my
family and I, contractors and tradespeople, the production company and its employees,
and the dual networks. Victories around the table. Ignorantly, I just thought
we’d gravitate back to where we needed to be. But in the end, it falls on me to
admit that I knew to put things down on paper, at the least so that the network
and the production company could have a written record of what each of them were
saying to me.
In benefit
of the doubt concluding, producers had a lot going on, many more rehabbing
shows than ours in South Carolina. Which only goes back to the responsibility
being on me, even if I realized it too late. From the point of in getting
turned upside down, I was in salvage mode: doing whatever I could to still get
on the home improvement juggernaut to save face.
*
In the
final days of pilot filming, a Charleston news crew was dispatched to come visit.
They wanted to grab a few minutes of footage of the activity, maybe interviewing
me and members of the production team or contractors.
On one
hand, this development sounded really good to me. I wanted as many of our friends
and neighbors as possible to have some confirmation that I hadn’t been blowing things
out of proportion for three months, that I actually was working towards an opportunity
with HGTV/DIY. Local news coming to see me and us would legitimize what we’d been
telling people, not because we were tooting our horns, but because we had to
explain as part of getting ready. Although not everyone we’d told would have seen
me on the news, word would have spread and that would have been long overdue
enough.
Yet, being
candid for those reading as well as myself, this possibility made me uneasy. What
I said and how I said everything on camera for this pilot episode would be
edited by the network producers. But if I was interviewed by one of the local
stations, they’d have been able to craft it however them deemed appropriate and
necessary. And that made me uncomfortable, and probably the showrunner as well because
the network needed to control the tone of the episode and they didn’t know just
what they had on film yet.
We were
starting on the outside and this really had me off balance from day one—I’d never
really gotten over the start-at-the-end plan-of-attack. I’d been trying to explain
someone else’s, or some committee’s choice, but it had been a two-week
struggle.
Sequencing
of a rehab is critical to its schedule and budgeting. Some wiggle room is alright,
but wackiness like starting on the outside costs a lot of time and money. I’d
been solidly stoked about the project before everything was flipped. But my enthusiasm
and confidence were shaky, rocked off my point-of-view foundation.
Typically,
interior demolition is an exciting phase, my first chance to really see how the
house is built or has been added onto. Potential to utilize natural light
becomes clearer. I begin to understand the history of the home better by seeing
what’s beneath plaster and sheetrock.
And building
the carport for the pilot would have been such a fresh gust of life onto the
half acre site. This addition was over five hundred square feet of area to work
under. The completed, connected side porch would have created a covered thoroughfare
into the front part of the house that was being reestablished as the heart of
the home just inside from the one-of-a-kind front porch. And having the new
roof on, a leak free interior was also something that would have thrilled me, organic
energy I needed on camera.
I could
have easily talked to local news folks about this approach, but what we were doing
really made me jittery, frail without concentrated effort, and lacking the needed
conviction that was lost within the surprising change of plans.
So even
though I’d been shooting straight about this chance to rehab my next house for producers,
and local news would have made it all known right then, I was okay that they
been told to stand down. The production company reps called the station, discouraging
reporters from making the trip. It was made adamantly clear that local newspeople
would not be given access to the project, me, or anyone else working on behalf
of the networks. They didn’t really need to explain why. I realized it was for
the best.
It was one
of many missed opportunities and another example of my own, private over-optimism.
*
The pilot filming
wrapped on schedule, a week before the Flowertown Festival kicked off, when the
town of Summerville would be flooded just a few blocks away with thousands of
visitors. Even though producers had heard about this event, as well as the
Cooper River Bridge Run on Saturday of that same weekend, the film team was
back to their homes in Minnesota and Southern California before they were able
to see any of this excitement for themselves. This is another situation where I
fell short, unable to keep them in town for the region’s big weekend.
I’d thought I was more prepared for this moment than I really was. Maybe it was hopefulness eclipsing actual certainty. I’d been outmatched and outmaneuvered, wilting when I needed to emerge and thrive.
This had me in an unenviable position, just trying to scratch and grind out enough out enough to get HGTV, at least once, to avoid going down in flames as some laughable fraudster who'd tried to get people around him to buy into silliness.
Response to TV Show Viewers: Post 43 - Coming Soon
No comments:
Post a Comment