Home Edition

Ever watched "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"? The one with the hunky carpenter and his band of equally good-looking, if loquacious, carpenter's assistants? The show always bothered me a little. Something besides the dizzying camerawork, I mean. I didn't think about it much, so I never got around to figuring out what actually bothers me about it, but Slate.com hit the nail on the head, so to speak:

As Newsweek has pointed out, an Extreme Makeover makeover could add thousands of dollars in new property taxes—which, in all likelihood, the owners couldn't afford. Last year, Ty led his troops on a mission to house on a depressed block in Watts, in South Central Los Angeles. The team performed its usual miracles, never bothering to consider the social consequences of erecting a fortress that towered over every other house on the block. And then there's the nagging feeling that building a 5,300-square-foot home, however magnanimous an act, may not be the most appropriate solution for a problem like sewage backup.

That being said, those surfer-type handymen ("handypeople?") do put forth a noble effort to give people better lives. And that's good.