In recent years, lifestyle television programs in which houses are remodeled, redecorated, or repaired have become a staple of cable television. However, this category of television programming really developed in the 1990s. Labeling these rarely researched programs “homestyle” television, I interrogate how such programs became a significant phenomenon in American television between 1990-2005 and what this home improvement boom can tell us about American culture. I argue that the context of postfeminist gender relations is a key theme for understanding this television trend.

Whereas some recent research has focused on how lifestyle television disciplines its participants or celebrates consumption, I seek to connect homestyle television to the history of domestic advice media and the social uses of such advice to ameliorate cultural tensions. This research approach is inspired by Raymond Williams’ sociology of culture and situated in relation to the field of feminist television criticism.

Through studying television schedules and popular and trade press reports about the programs, I identify and assess the surprisingly wide range of homestyle programs on offer, the commercial contexts in which they developed, and the ways in which the trend was framed and interpreted. These programs presented an array of domestic gender roles and discourses about domestic production and consumption, as well as craft or do-it-yourself (DIY) labor. In doing so, they subtly remodeled domesticity and the conventions of lifestyle television. Drawing these themes together, I suggest that the homestyle television boom could not have happened as it did had it not been conducive to television business practices and ameliorative of anxieties about social transformations of traditional gender roles.