Hack My Home: Is the weight of domestic labor distributed by a sleek modular solution
Is the bounty of a sudden transformation lasting?
Hack My Home on Netflix is your average home-improvement series where a team of four competent people with complementary skills and marketable personalities descend upon an unfortunate family living poorly in an otherwise serviceable house. For those familiar, this is basically the version of Queer Eye except they only focus on the part that Bobby Berk manages: housing and space. Also, perhaps unfairly, Bobby is only given a week to complete the assignment whereas Hack My Home takes on projects that could comfortably span months (finishing an entire basement to become a living area, for example).
The homes all begin with the same problems: there's not enough storage to be organized so the house is a mess, which reduces space, and therefore affects the daily activities of the residents. In half of the episodes, some residents don't have any privacy at all. For example, a son is forced to live in a Murphy bed in the living room, or a nephew is delegated to a couch in the basement or four teenage sisters are forced to share one loft with one bathroom together. There's a level of dramatization to this mess in the beginning of each episode. For example, the horrific kind of pantry situation that forces the family to reckon with crockpots falling on their head or makeshift cribs that could be endangering the child's life (as per federal guidelines).
We are supposed to be astounded that these people—normal, loving, sometimes accomplished, but mainly, relatable—are living in such circumstances. The cast tries to have as little judgment about the problem as possible, and when they fail, it's presented as comedic commentary. Cast member Mikel Welch, designer and aesthetic overlord, has several moments of Sassy Commentary™ where he goes, "Ma'am how do you live like this?"
But by solving for the house's problems now or at least the next five years, the team doesn't consider what might have caused the space to become this way. And, I think that's a mistake. In the end, the families are all grateful to have a highly customized renovation that speaks to their functional and aesthetic needs. But I keep wondering if their problems are genuinely solved or if they just have more space with which to experience them.
In Queer Eye, Karamo Brown is the only cast member who is tasked with the invisible and ambiguous assignment of changing the psychological behaviors that caused the client to be in their dilapidated state in the first place. When watching Queer Eye, the clients are grateful for receiving what is, at best, therapeutic support (since the inclusion of cameras in the space doesn't necessarily grant the same intimacy as actual therapy). But it's highly unlikely to me that such behavioral changes stick after the week ends, especially during a week in which the client is trying to clean up five different aspects of their lives.
Behavioral changes have to be incorporated into habit in order to last. Similarly, I imagine having a new apartment needs to be maintained that way for it to continue being as stunning as it is on the day of the reveal. A refurbished new apartment is not necessarily going to stop hoarding tendencies.
Hack My Home has a very formulaic ending: with cutting edge technology and some stunning design choices, the family is floored at engineering marvel catered to their needs, and creating more space out of thin air. It's the most generic kind of problem solving to watch, and it already has a neat solution. Throughout the episodes, cast members try ideas and prototypes and brainstorming. This process they call design, mechanics and engineering to themselves and to the camera. They go so far as to incorporate hydraulic devices, and mechanized furniture (which cast member Jessica Banks will sometimes attribute to her MIT roots). To their clients, the team calls it, "magic". The word is used at least once per episode, and like magic itself, I wonder if the so-called effectiveness that’s imagined by these experts at their desk will measure up to real life wear-and-tear.
For example, in Episode 6: Toddler vs. Teenager, Minnah (the teenager) needs a bed, a music studio space, and privacy from an extremely persistent toddler in her house. Whether one calls the toddler (her younger brother by ten years) lovable or annoying is genuinely up to interpretation because he displays a talent to be both. To solve for this, the team creates a bed that disappears flush into the ceiling and is controlled via remote to be lowered down when Minnah needs to sleep. This is extremely cool, and Minnah is obviously delighted with it. But how many times in a day would you actually be able to rest if you have to wait 20 minutes for your bed to ascend and descend properly? What happens when she outgrows that bed? She is shown to use her desk space as a "dumping zone" in the beginning of the episode. If I were Minnah and I had a disappearing bed, I would immediately make my bed the new default dumping zone.
There's also no real problems or conflicts that the Hack my Home team faces. In the initial seasons of Queer Eye, by working exclusively with straight men in predominantly red states, the cast members tried to make the lives and lifestyles of gay men accessible to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to consider or grapple with the concept. The camera captures them answering many personal, even intrusive, questions about their lives. In Hack my Home, the hardest challenge the team faces is delayed furniture, and redoing a design because of this sourcing delay. This happens exactly twice in eight episodes, which feels astonishingly rare. The team never encounters issues with their contracted labor, which also feels like a lie. But perhaps the biggest lie of them all is that the cast members will even complement each other frequently ("that looks so good", "what a great idea", etc.), giving us the impression that these four different personalities work seamlessly.
Throughout Season 1, there’s a latent consideration of motherhood that’s highlighted across all the families in Hack My Home. Three episodes in the series (all of whom have four young children) stood out to me as different points in the spectrum of family-planning choices. Having four children, to me, feels like a non-trivial choice. Planning for such a family extends not only to immediate infant care, but to their extended needs of education, space, play and socialization that a house is supposed to bear for them. I should also caveat here that I am an only child, so having three other siblings feels extremely noisy for me. Arguably, my childhood may seem comparatively lonely to others. Choosing to have (or not have) children is an emotional subject that I do not have space or qualifications to speak about, but I would imagine that such a choice cannot be made lightly.
In Episode 1: Secret Office Space Reveal, the family have four biological sons (all two years apart from each other) and they are endearing but feral, in the way characterized by four rambunctious young boys. The house doesn’t have a room quiet enough for Dad to work from home, so Mom has to entertain the kids upstairs while Dad (who is a therapist) completes his appointments in the basement. To solve for the noise, the team hacks together two isolated rooms in the basement: one that contains dad’s expandable office space and one play space for the kids.
In Episode 4: Homeschool Hacks, the family already has three children: a biological son, an adopted son from China and an adopted daughter from India. They are also in the midst of paperwork to adopt a fourth child from Hungary, hopefully a daughter. To me, this represents the other end of family planning. That is, adopting a child is an intentional choice in bringing them into the family. The tone throughout the episode highlights the generosity of the parents willing to "provide children in the world who don't have a family with one", and continues especially to focus on the mother who, as a former teacher, has taken the task of homeschooling four children at home.
This is challenging and noble, but I also have to ask how their family planning goals align with their residential goals. Why not move to a larger house if you know you're going to be housing and schooling four children? Was the decision to adopt the fourth child made before or after the three existing children started struggling for space? If Mom is a homeschool teacher, why was she not granted the space to teach as soon as the eldest child was of school-attending age?
Finally, in Episode 5: Quadruplet Mayhem, we encounter the opposite problem with family planning. Mom, Dad and Isla were expecting a second child. The house they live in houses four individuals comfortably. However, Mom ended up bearing quadruplets. Obviously, mothers do not control the fertilization process, and now the kids are already here, so almost all planning has to be re-done to accommodate four instead of one person. Now the house needs to be expanded for a family of 7. Mom here is also an elementary school teacher, so she needs to be out of the house by 6AM to report to school on time. Dad tries to work from home, but is mainly covered in miscellaneous baby fluids. Their house has basically transformed into a daycare, and Isla (who is comfortably 5 years older than her quadruplet siblings) is trying to find her time and space with Mom and Dad buried under four new babies. She is quiet, shy and adorable, but it's very clear that the parents' focus on managing four infants at a time means that her needs are relegated. She gets to enjoy a play-space that the team creates for her siblings until they're old enough to join her there.
Obviously, the moral arc of these shows is to give these struggling people a new chance at their life. The mothers I described are grateful to the point of shedding tears at the end of the episode. But there's a pessimist in me that has to ask how pristine and beautiful the space is going to stay once the team has gone. More storage does mean more organizing, but even the act of organizing requires time, and do the moms I described above have that kind of time? More so, do these tools actually help the parents delegate childcare needs between each other?
I would love to have retrospectives of everyone who participates in reality shows of this sort, to know how lasting the change is.