Charity Begins at Home

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Home Edition is part of a mini-revival of fairy-godmother TV, recalling Queen for a Day, the 1950s show on which women won prizes for their sob stories. Oprah Winfrey has dedicated this season of her talk show to realizing people's "wildest dreams." In September she gave away Pontiac G6s to her studio audience. The trend comes, curiously, during a slowdown, or even decline, in charitable donations that began in the 1990s and at a time when the era of Big Government do-gooderism is long since over. If a federal program were building multi-six-figure dream homes for the afflicted, Rush Limbaugh would have an aneurysm. Yet nearly 20 million a week cheer ABC's life-changing largesse. Home Edition is charity for the Bush era, harnessing the power of private enterprises like Disney and Sears to provide a high-entertainment safety net. It even involves faith-based initiatives, as when the crew goes to one family's church to enlist neighbors to volunteer for the construction crew. "It's like a community barn raising," says Pennington.

This may be the key to Home Edition's appeal: it lets viewers see themselves as George Bailey's selfless neighbors and America as Bedford Falls. And ABC plans to continue spreading the wealth, spinning off Extreme Makeover: Wedding Edition, while other networks are readying their own feel-good "wish fulfillment" reality shows. There should be plenty of applicants. Home Edition is getting a thousand a week. Which means TV had better start rolling up its sleeves.