The saga of families on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition didn’t end with a crowd chanting “Move that bus!”
Tuesday’s episode of Dark Side of Reality TV focused on the original version of the ABC series, on which designers helped families who’d gone through hardship by overhauling their homes. The Ty Pennington-hosted show aired for nine seasons, from 2003 to 2012, on ABC. It was rebooted in 2020, with host Jesse Tyler Ferguson, on another network, but that wasn’t scrutinized here.
Members of two families who had appeared on the show looked back on their stories of having been negatively affected. They said being on it had caused great financial and mental strain, all for the sake of good television.
But two producers appeared, too, and had a different perspective.
“Sometimes,” producer Emily Sinclair said, “there are things that happen to people in life as a one-off event, and then sometimes that are things that continue to happen, problems that continue to arise. And, you know, we can’t fix that kind of thing. You know, at some point, the show must go on.”
Sinclair’s comment followed news footage of a report that some of the homes that received a makeover were foreclosed on afterward, because the owners faced a much larger tax bill and other expenses.
One such story was that of the Okvath family, who were on the second season. She alleged that her electric bill drained the accounts of her family, after their family home was rebuilt without her knowing it was going to happen.
The Okvath family appeared in 2005, after their 8-year-old daughter Kassandra requested to make over the children’s hospital where she went for cancer treatment. She wanted to paint the walls, so they weren’t so drab.
The show had bigger plans, though, and, as the family was sent away to paint, their house was destroyed to make room for one much more decadent. They had no clue, even as they were being taken home in a limo with blacked-out windows. It made the exhausted Kassandra carsick.
“Putting it all together now,” mom Nichol Okvath said, “the very last second of leaving the limo, it dawned on me: What if they did do our house?”
Although it had been unexpected, she was as ecstatic as her daughter to see what was now a mansion. Kassandra adored her princess-themed bedroom.
“Seeing the house was unbelievable, in every majestic way you can see a house,” the elder Okvath said. “I will never ever, ever, ever til the day I die ever forget that feeling.”
Sinclair said that, for her, the reveal was the best part of her job.
“I tell you, that moment never got old,” Sinclair said. “Like, to this day, I remember the bus pulling away and then the families’ reaction to them seeing their house for the first time. That was a drug that I did not wanna stop.”
Producer Michael Addis recalled that over the course of the show, “invariably, the family got such an upgrade in their lives that the ending would be a happy ending.” But that’s not what happened with the Okvaths, whose lavish new digs included a computer for each person and a home movie theater.
“It was an expensive house,” Nichol Okvath said. “Our first electric bill was like $2,200, which was way more than our mortgage ever was. And I about died.”
Another issue was that people stole from them — the police were called several times — and one night Kassandra encountered a man inside with a hammer.
The Okvaths shut down part of their gifted home, and. resorted to taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to hang on to the house. They ended up having to sell it for much less than it was worth during the financial crisis a few years later. Nichol estimated they “walked out with $8,000 of that house.”
The Higgins family, who appeared on another 2005 episode, said the show took advantage of their tragic story. The parents of the five, mostly teenage siblings had died just months before they were on the show, alongside the Leomiti family that had taken them in.
Although everything looked picture perfect during the reveal — Jeremiah Higgins said in the doc the home looked like something you would see on MTV Cribs — it went downhill as soon as the cameras left. The Higgins’ all moved out of the home within months, feeling used, and alleged in a lawsuit against the Leomitis that they had taken belongings from them, including the home and cars (!) gifted to them by the show. They were unsuccessful.
The siblings said the show knew what was going on with them, but their episode aired again.
“It’s the same people that we laughed with, that cared about telling our story, didn’t care about what happened to us,” Higgins said. “We don’t have a place to stay, and we are… we’re kids. The story is still running that we’re happy, that we’re living there. People are seeing us jumping around, but yet we have nothing.”
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition faced another public relations crisis in 2016, when an internal memo, featuring a wish list for families with specific health conditions, was leaked.
“It’s unfortunate, because I think that that email that went out, it sounded really exploitative,” Sinclair said. “It sounded like it was just, you know, casting for the sake of a look. The thing is, like, once you do so many of these, you don’t want to really continue to tell the same story over and over again, so I understand where that was coming from. But the manner in which people were spoken about was just kind of degrading, and it was a little bit gross.”
Addis stood by the show’s good intentions.
“Does that make us bad?” he asked. “If you say, ‘I heard about this disease, and now I wonder if there’s somebody that is going through this that we could gift a new house to,’ is that wrong?”
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Still, Sinclair said she had a good feeling about what the team had done.
“Every time I walked away, I felt confident that these families really were in a better place,” she said. “That they were truly appreciative, and it was just, you know, we had done the right thing.”