There’s a reliable predictability among dentist offices: The acrid odor of industrial-strength toothpaste. The faint whir of a drill competing with Muzak. Thomas Kinkade Americana landscapes. Well-thumbed issues of Highlights. Molar-shaped planters. And, if there’s a television, Property Brothers or House Hunters distracting you from your impending root canal.
HGTV programming is perfect background filler: innocuous, yet compelling. But its lineup chronicling the triumphs (and tragedies) of houses hunted, flipped, fixed, and transformed is also primal—eminently watchable. In 2018, HGTV shows in prime time averaged 1.3 million viewers, fourth behind Fox News, ESPN, and MSNBC. What began as a how-to home improvement cable upstart is now, as it celebrates its 25th anniversary, an American institution, a multimedia empire that has upended how we talk about—and what we expect from—our homes. Granite countertops and stainless steel appliances are now as much a part of real-estate calculus as school districts and property taxes. Weekend warriors are now all in on complex repair or build projects. And finding the right accent rug to tie a room together is more than just Big Lebowski roleplay.
When Kenneth Lowe conceived of HGTV in the early 1990s, the national conversation about where we live was much different—if it existed at all. “Home building [and] home design 20 years ago was this deep, dark mystery. People just didn’t understand it, and a lot of what HGTV has done is educate the public,” Lowe says. “It used to be just shelter—you need a home. Now it’s more about, ‘What’s my lifestyle, what’s my family’s lifestyle, and how’s my home going to best fit and serve it, and how can I design it?’”
Lowe joined the E.W. Scripps Company in 1980 as general manager of its radio stations. (Scripps was best known for its national newspaper empire.) Cable, still in its infancy, was just emerging as a major disruptive force: ESPN launched in 1979, CNN in 1980, and MTV in 1981. But Lowe, a “frustrated architect” who enjoyed working on and building houses, saw an opportunity to marry his hobby and industry experience in this nascent television format. His sense that a niche network devoted to home could work was informed by his time in radio, the publications he saw on newsstands, and rising interest from his friends in discussing who built, designed, and landscaped a house. “The boomer generation was coming of age in the late ’80s, early ’90s relative to focusing on home, and that began this incredible boom,” Lowe recalls.
At the time, the only home-focused TV program was PBS’s popular renovation show This Old House. But Lowe was convinced a home-dedicated cable network would connect with viewers. He was prepared to leave Scripps and shop his idea around, but his CEO wound up backing the idea. Lowe’s elaborate pitch to Scripps’s board of directors included magazine racks overflowing with niche shelter titles. It was a canny way to show print people there was money to be made by seizing the home category on television. And it worked. In 1993, Lowe was given $25 million for Home & Garden Television. In December 1994, HGTV went live.
When HGTV was announced, it was part of a gold rush that included 102 other cable channels, including The Popcorn Network and The Horse Riding Channel. “Honestly, there were low, low expectations,” Lowe says. “I’ve had a lot of doors slammed in my face by cable operators who said, ‘This is too small of an idea, nobody’s really going to watch this, we just can’t see it.’”
But HGTV bucked the industry trend. Its first years were noteworthy for their homogeneity: wall-to-wall how-to shows like Room by Room, Dream Builders, Gardening by the Yard, and Kitty Bartholomew's You're Home. And viewers loved it. A call center Scripps set up to gather viewer feedback was overwhelmed. Celebrities were fans, as was the first family (Lowe says President Bill Clinton reinstalled cable in the West Wing so Hillary could watch HGTV). “All of a sudden it took on this cultural element,” Lowe says. “We had tapped into this wave of boomers becoming interested in home. They just couldn’t get enough.”
Indeed, HGTV’s timing was perfect, its popularity mirroring a booming national home repair and renovation market. In 1994, Home Depot reported net sales of $12.47 million; in 2018, that number was $108.2 billion. Lowe’s Home Improvement saw net sales rise from $6.1 million in 1994 to $71.3 billion in 2018. The housing market took off, overheated, exploded into a generation-defining global recession, then rebounded. Interest in interior design intensified, and countless professional and amateur designers colonized and popularized blogs and websites like Etsy. HGTV certainly didn’t bend the direction of the American economy, but it was “smart enough to ride the wave of what was going on in society and be reflective of it,” Lowe says.
This meeting of network and moment also cultivated an insta-expert, DIY culture, often in trades that require deep skill and acumen. “After you've watched for a while, you learn vocabulary,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Newhouse School’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “You start to learn about certain kinds of light bulbs and the difference between countertops.”
This self-education was aided by what fans read in HGTV Magazine, a trove of branded books, and countless websites. Lowe jokes that builders will sometimes complain they’re driven crazy by HGTV viewers mossy with their own ideas. Thompson has heard that real estate agents “absolutely hate” HGTV. And Judith Gura, an author and professor at the New York School of Interior Design, suggests that HGTV’s ethos worries the design community. “It takes a lot of thought to plan a room. You need good advice. People can’t necessarily do it themselves,” Gura points out. “But the growth of HGTV has helped get more people interested in the home, and I think that’s good for interior design in general.”
HGTV’s success also, inevitably, courted controversy. Rumors swirled that the real estate shows were overly staged—seemingly confirmed by a 2012 blog post about one person’s experience on House Hunters. There were also allegations that the renovation shows left homes in even worse shape—the focus of a 2016 lawsuit filed by two homeowners who claimed Love It or List It “irreparably damaged” their home.
But such bad press has done little to stop the HGTV juggernaut. Shows like House Hunters, Property Virgins, Property Brothers, and Fixer Upper, brands unto themselves, are embedded in the network’s lineup. (Some hosts, such as Ty Pennington, have even become design and product influencers.) On any given day you can find unbroken hours of a program, where the specifics change but arcs and narratives hardly vary. This has allowed the network to saturate its fans with comfortingly predictable content while making it easy for new viewers to tune in and enter a program at any time.
“When you look at that lineup, you think to yourself, ‘What kind of bogus cable network is this?’” Thompson says. “But it’s really quite an ingenious plan. I see HGTV as kind of like a utility. You turn the faucet on, and water comes out. You turn on HGTV, and HGTV comes out.”
Out of those 103 cable networks announced in 1993, only two made it: History, and Home & Garden Television. HGTV became the centerpiece of Scripps Networks Interactive, which eventually included the Food Network and Travel Channel. Lowe ran SNI as chairman, president, and CEO until Discovery Inc. acquired it in 2018 for $12 billion.
What began as an upstart cable network 25 years ago has grown into a far more complex organism. And as HGTV enters its 26th year, the work becomes securing its long-time baby boomer viewership while pulling in more millennials and building a brand that appeals to Gen Z. This challenge has seen the channel create more generation-specific shows, such as Tiny House Hunters, while expanding into multiplatform experiences. Programs are broken into social-media-friendly clips, while new short-form content, like The Find & The Fix, is created for Facebook Watch.
But even as HGTV chases new kinds of programs for emerging distribution channels, its long-term success ultimately depends on something more lo-fi and difficult: retaining the core simplicity, predictability, and especially empathy that has made HGTV an American institution.
“The emotional, connective side of this is why I started the network,” Lowe says. “Was there a business here? Yeah. Did it turn out to be a heck of a business? Yeah. But success for me was going to be, could people tap into this, and could it impact their lives? And I would have to say it succeeded beyond my wildest expectations.”
