Charity Begins at Home

Ali

ce Harris of South Central Los Angeles fondly remembers the day when the good people from ABC volunteered to demolish her house. In 2003 a flood left the community activist and her family, who had no insurance, living in one bedroom. Worst of all, the waters ruined a stash of Christmas toys Harris had collected for poor kids. "I figured no one was going to come to Watts and help us," she says. "No one had ever done that."

That was before Extreme Makeover: Home Edition found her. Home Edition brought in its army of designers, led by bullhorn-wielding host Ty Pennington, to do what it does best: destroy a home in order to save it. After shipping Harris and kin off for a week's vacation in Carlsbad, Calif., 100 workers and neighbors tore her home down to the foundation and built a new, bigger one. They replaced the Christmas toys and donated appliances, mattresses and landscaping to her flood-stricken neighbors. They even threw in a basketball court for the neighborhood kids.

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Home Edition (Sundays, 8 p.m. E.T.) is a TV oxymoron: a feel-good reality show. Without any participant's having to eat animal entrails or be insulted by judges, it has exploded in its second season into a Top 10 hit by presenting itself less as a home-improvement show than a life-improvement show. Each week the design team meets a family with a heart-wrenching story — disability, death, debt — and tailors a monster renovation to its needs. For the Vardon family of Oak Park, Mich.--two deaf parents with a blind, autistic son named Lance, 12, and a sighted son Stefan, 14--the team built a house with high-tech aids, including flashing-light smoke alarms and Braille labels on the walls. The Vardons also got a $50,000 college scholarship for Stefan.

In essence, Home Edition is like the reality-TV version of It's a Wonderful Life, in which Bedford Falls pitches in to rescue solid citizen George Bailey. Executive producer Tom Forman says the show's makers assess applications on "need and, to the extent we can judge it, merit. We look for people who have been nominated by their neighbors, people whose communities have told us are really special." The show also hews to the old formula of something for Mom, Dad and the kids: five-hankie stories, plus home-improvement tips, plus guys ripping off roofs with tractors. The renovations run to several hundred thousand dollars, the costs defrayed by conspicuous product placements.