Virginia Postrel, Columnist

Why Americans Long to Live in an HGTV Home

It's an uncynical world where anything that falls apart can be revived.

January 5, 2017 at 3:59 PM EST

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

We can't stop watching.
Photographer: Lisa Werner/Getty Images

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Home & Garden Television is the mac and cheese of cable -- video comfort food. And, like that perennial favorite, it sells very well. Last year, HGTV was the third-most-watched cable network after ESPN and Fox News.

In a recent feature on the company, Bloomberg’s Gerry Smith attributed the network’s success to the “escapist appeal of looking at other people’s beautiful homes” in a year rife with conflict. “The relentlessly pleasant programming is a comfort, especially in hard times,” he wrote.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

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