Home improvement television: Holmes on Homes Makes It Right

Holmes on Homes is a Canadian home improvement television program and the centrepiece of HGTV (Home and Garden Television), featuring Mike Holmes as the series’ star contractor and host. This paper argues that by looking back at earlier incarnations of film and television melodrama, we can determine the way in which Holmes on Homes reinvents the home improvement subgenre. By playing out reality TV’s central tension between fiction and non-fiction, Holmes on Homes reveals its larger themes of justice and redemption, which befit its unique position between the documentary and the classic melodrama.