 | | John Shearer/Netflix |
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One of the curious effects of staying at home all the time is that the zeitgeist feels less atomized and more coherent. Many of us who might otherwise fancy ourselves iconoclasts actually did tackle complex baking projects, try YouTube fitness classes, break out the jigsaw puzzles, and binge whatever new entertainments came our way. What else are we supposed to do?
Oh yes, we also cleaned. We suddenly needed to transform basements into classrooms, overlooked nooks into home offices. Whether we’re apartment dwellers who want our homes to be as efficiently organized as a ship or suburbanites with thousands of square feet at our disposal, the fact of all our clutter is harder to ignore when we’re spending this much time with it.
Get Organized With the Home Edit is a product for this moment—a Netflix event that you can watch to feel connected, however tenuously, to the culture. It is a show that preaches that order, harmony, and simplicity in our domestic spaces will bring happiness to our lives, global pandemic or no.
The Home Edit is a Nashville-based home-organizing firm founded by Joanna Teplin and Clea Shearer. The founders’ savvy on Instagram—where 3.7 million people follow their vision of a world of pantries stocked with plastic canisters—has helped the business open locations in seven other cities. What the Home Edit promises is simple: the things of your life tastefully sorted, arranged by color, and happily waiting for you whenever you need them. And it is potent.
Teplin and Shearer are lovable, or at least relatable. They don’t feel like performers but like women you know, with a charisma and strange chemistry (do they really share a hotel room while traveling for business? I applaud the thrift) that is all their own. Still, Get Organized is a ridiculous show, one I watched first with bemusement, then with something close to horror.
In each episode, we tag along as the duo tackles a project in the home of a celebrity, then deals with civilian clients. In the pilot, the celebrity is Reese Witherspoon, who is an executive producer on the show. Stars, they’re just like us, in that they, too, have junk, even if their junk is gowns sported at various award ceremonies. Teplin and Shearer have only one bit of advice: Get rid of stuff you don’t want, buy matching hangers and lots of plastic bins and boxes in which to stash the things you do, and label everything prettily. It really is that easy, though it helps if you have a closet the size of a studio apartment.
There is nothing substantial about cleaning out drawers or making your pantry look like a store (evidently a popular request). The whiff of girlboss ethos in the pilot—Witherspoon says that she was especially drawn to the Home Edit ladies because of her admiration for “female partnerships”—feels like an admission that even the producers understand just how slight a concept this is for a television program. The show wisely does not belabor this point.
The episodes run about 40 minutes, but truly they could be four: These could be Instagram stories instead of a Netflix show. The important stuff is the hodgepodge of the before contrasted with the soothing calm of the after. That said, the rest of the business with the celebrity guests is fascinating, if galling. I love fashion and understand that a person in that business would need to store a lot of things. Nevertheless, watching Rachel Zoe—herself a former reality show attraction—fumble about a closet stuffed with a staggering amount of luxurious dross made me feel … unwell. “Before I had children, my children were my possessions, honestly,” Zoe admits. I’m as materialistic as any American, but by episode two of this show, I was prepared to renounce all my worldly belongings.
It’s hard to fathom why the celebrities who appear on this show would bother. Perhaps it’s the allure of being involved in a project led by Witherspoon, who has managed the trick of remaining a star while being involved in so many side hustles. But none of the celebrities here (a decidedly B-list cohort) is able to seem normal and appealing in the way that Witherspoon, by some strange magic, always does.
Eva Longoria plays down-to-earth mom struggling to manage all her kid’s things, but she seems deranged as she shows off her toddler’s massive wardrobe. Neil Patrick Harris appears tickled when the ladies first show up to his Harlem townhouse, then later embarrassed, less by the fact that his children have a truly sickening number of toys and games than that he’s deigned to take part in this project. Khloé Kardashian is a lovely young woman, but the show seems to reveal that she’s struggling with some very serious obsessive-compulsive behavior.
The “real” people featured are charming and fun—no reality show producer would cast them if they weren’t. But I don’t want to look at a dumpy house full of too many things: I live in one of those. I want to snoop on the rich(er than me) and (somewhat) famous. The people are a sideshow, though. The star is the stuff. Why do we have all this stuff? Because we can afford it? Because we need it? I don’t know why we can’t stop ourselves from acquiring so much. But I think I know why some of us want to acquire more—plastic boxes, matching hangers, drawer organizers—to tame all this stuff, to make it look beautiful. We want to take a picture, and share it with the world, and say, loudly: This is my stuff! This is me! |
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| The Times’ Alexandra Alter has a revealing portrait of “the most powerful executive in American publishing,” Madeline McIntosh, which explores the ways in which that business is evolving to be “more profit focused, consolidated, undifferentiated and averse to risk.” |
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| I loved Lauren Oyler’s essay for Harper’s on the very great Shirley Hazzard. |
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| This piece by my colleague Alex Shephard gave me some hope (!) about the future of the media business. |
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| There’s a kerfuffle brewing in the art world about the (absurd, to my mind) decision on the part of some major museums to postpone a Philip Guston show. |
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Text Message is a twice-monthly column in newsletter form. Subscribe. Tell your friends. Drop me a line, at ralam@tnr.com. Stay healthy; stay home!
—Rumaan Alam, contributing editor |
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