Television helps with normalization

Years from now, when historians try to make sense of our current era when so much social change is afoot, they might find themselves watching re-runs of home improvement shows on cable TV.

Admittedly, that’s what we’ve been doing on slow weekend afternoons during the COVID-19 era.

But imagine a researcher in the year, say, 2050 sitting in front of some viewscreen we’ve never dreamed of and studying old footage from “House Hunters” or “Property Brothers” or “Love It Or List It.”

They’ll study those shows and dozens like them, because there’s something to be found there.

It’s called normalization.

Social change has been pretty much a constant in my lifetime.

Within the span of my three score and 10 and more, laws banning interracial marriage have been stricken from the books, gay marriage became the law of the land, the Americans with Disabilities Act changed the landscape and more.

Jim Crow laws were still in force when I was a kid. It took Freedom Riders to open up something as basic as a bus ride across the South to a Black American.

All of those were monumental events.

But it took the sometimes goofy world of home improvement TV to transform the monumental into the normal.

HGTV has been a quiet pioneer on this front.

Consider:

•A couple is looking for a new house in the suburbs. They have a budget, and — for entertainment value — they have conflicting tastes. The fact that the couple is gay isn’t the focus of the program. The house hunt is. Their relationship is normalized precisely because it’s not news.

•A family wants to remodel a kitchen so that it’s more accessible to a dad in a wheelchair. His disability isn’t the news. The focus is on how to solve the remodeling problem in that kitchen.

•An interracial couple is looking to buy a house in small town Mississippi — Mississippi! — and the point of the show is to find a cute house, remodel it in a creative and entertaining way, pass along a few tips to the do-it-yourself crowd, and have a “reveal” with plenty of wow. Race and the marriage aren’t news. And anyone who attempted to make that an issue would be shooed off in a heartbeat.

This has not been a propaganda campaign — though I’m sure there are folks out there who see it that way.

Instead, it’s been a matter of seeing the world the way it actually is.

Gay couples exist. Interracial couples have been around for decades. The physically challenged have always been with us.

Normalizing them, bringing them into our living rooms via cable TV home improvement fodder has just reflected reality.

But by doing so, that programming has also broadened the horizons of its audience, inch by inch, show by show, until — maybe — we begin to have a better understanding of who we are as a human society.

Is that overreaching? Could be.

You’ll have to ask a historian about that in 2050.