Great notice for ABC's new series "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" in the L.A. Times California section today.
That's right -- California, not Calendar section. The paper takes a news approach to covering a family that recently benefited from the Sunday night TV show's format.
If you haven't seen the show, it's actually a pretty uplifting hour that takes the "Trading Spaces" concept and puts it on acid. Rather than renovate a room for $1,000 ("Trading Spaces'" m.o.), "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" sends a needy family away for a week's vacation and proceeds to completely redo their house, from top to bottom at a price tag in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The show will usually completely gut a house and reconstruct it in a week. All-new furnishings (flat-screen TVs, etc.) are added. This is not a cheap show.
By the end of the show, when the needy family comes home to their new digs, you'll be bawling. I was two weeks ago, when "EM:HE" overhauled the home of a woman who serves as the de facto mother for a tough Watts neighborhood.
But back to the L.A. Times story. Paper writes about this Sunday's episode, in which the show's designers and builders completely overhaul a house in Ventura to make life easier for 23-year-old quadriplegic Robert Gil.
Notes the story: Using donated materials, the TV crew installed a variety of high-tech gizmos that make Gil's life easier.
They also widened doorways, installed a wheelchair ramp and lowered the dining table for Gil's wheelchair.
But the biggest lift came from a Connecticut company. Concord Elevator donated, and installed, a $30,000 custom elevator to allow Gil to move around all three stories of his home for the first time in nearly three years.
The head of ABC's alternative ("reality") department told us last week we'll be choked up by the end of this week's show. Grab the tissue. ("Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" airs Sunday night at 8 p.m. on ABC.)
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