Thursday, February 25, 2016
We Need to Talk About Tarek & Christina
I don't know if I've ever written about HTV's Flip or Flop on here before, but I'm too lazy to search my archives and find out, and regardless I feel sort of a desperate need to address the topic. Come to think of it, I don't even know if I've written about Love It or List It on here before, and I could easily see myself filling loose leaf notebooks with love poetry about Hilary. God, I may have really fallen down on the job here. My apologies to America.
Anyway, Flip or Flop follows a mismatched married couple as they buy crappy houses, renovate them, and almost always sell at an absurd profit. Tarek is the real estate agent, as he constantly reminds us, and is pale, kind of generally pointy, and wears lots of bad shorts. Christina is the designer, and always wears enough makeup to star in a revival of Sweet Charity. Primarily they watch other people do renovation work and repeatedly act surprised when houses that were openly vandalized and missing fixtures when they bought them turn out to have other problems like, say, bad wiring. "This could turn out to be a total flop," they say, before selling the place for twice what they paid.
They also make some truly horrific design choices, like artificially distressed flooring that looks like it came from the waiting area at the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and, well, faux everything. I have to feel that these houses disintegrate in a cloud of plywood and laminate the minute they drive away.
Also, why are they married? (That could actually be the title for a lot of HGTV shows.) They often seem like strangers who are vaguely annoyed to encounter one another in the tile aisle at the Home Depot.
I don't know if I've ever written about HTV's Flip or Flop on here before, but I'm too lazy to search my archives and find out, and regardless I feel sort of a desperate need to address the topic. Come to think of it, I don't even know if I've written about Love It or List It on here before, and I could easily see myself filling loose leaf notebooks with love poetry about Hilary. God, I may have really fallen down on the job here. My apologies to America.
Anyway, Flip or Flop follows a mismatched married couple as they buy crappy houses, renovate them, and almost always sell at an absurd profit. Tarek is the real estate agent, as he constantly reminds us, and is pale, kind of generally pointy, and wears lots of bad shorts. Christina is the designer, and always wears enough makeup to star in a revival of Sweet Charity. Primarily they watch other people do renovation work and repeatedly act surprised when houses that were openly vandalized and missing fixtures when they bought them turn out to have other problems like, say, bad wiring. "This could turn out to be a total flop," they say, before selling the place for twice what they paid.
They also make some truly horrific design choices, like artificially distressed flooring that looks like it came from the waiting area at the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and, well, faux everything. I have to feel that these houses disintegrate in a cloud of plywood and laminate the minute they drive away.
Also, why are they married? (That could actually be the title for a lot of HGTV shows.) They often seem like strangers who are vaguely annoyed to encounter one another in the tile aisle at the Home Depot.
