Week-to-Week: Melissa McCarthy—Emmy winner, Oscar nominee, and... HGTV host?
On the Celebrity (on) HGTV of it all on The Great Giveback with Melissa McCarthy and Jenna Perusich
If I’m talking to someone and reveal that I have cable, they’ll sometimes ask what I use it for at a time when streaming services exist. And while I do often watch live sports or tune into an award show, the simple truth is that its primary use is to turn on the TV when I’m having lunch or grabbing a snack and turning on HGTV.
If cable wasn’t included with my rent, I would probably just be using Discovery+ (which I also subscribe to), but I admittedly am attached to the experience of turning on the TV and being subject to whatever the schedulers at HGTV have decided to air on a given day. Do I resent when I turn on the TV at 12:30 and discover an endless Love It Or List It marathon, and I’m forced to sit through the worst homeowner acting on the channel? Absolutely. Am I annoyed if it’s in five episodes deep into a run of My Lottery Dream Home, and the only point of interest is dating the episode based on David Bromstad’s neck tattoos? You betcha. But being subjected to the lower tier HGTV shows is part of the appeal, my relationship with the channel and its stars a valuable constant in my media consumption patterns.
What this means, though, is that I am regularly exposed to advertising for the primetime HGTV shows airing at a given moment, which air outside of the hours where I’m naturally watching the channel. And this is how I came to learn that Melissa McCarthy was co-hosting a new series called The Great Giveback—well, technically, it’s called The Great Giveback with Melissa McCarthy and Jenna Perusich, but that’s ungainly. McCarthy is not the first celebrity—or Emmy winner—to show up in home renovation television of late, but she’s the first to commit to a full-time gig (alongside her cousin), pulling the role of actual celebrities to the forefront of the discourse around HGTV stars.
The notion of Celebrity Renovation is such a good one that it spawned a copycat: the Property Brothers’ Celebrity IOU launched in 2020 on HGTV, while CBS followed up with Secret Celebrity Renovation in 2021. They both follow the same premise, which is a celebrity working with the show’s team to provide a home makeover for someone who is important in their life or their career. The biggest difference was in star power: while CBS’ series drew a Dancing With The Stars-esque lineup of C-list stars, HGTV pulled in not one but five Oscar winners (Viola Davis, Halle Berry, Brad Pitt, Allison Janney, and Gwyneth Paltrow).1 It’s potentially the most star-studded celebrity reality program in television history, likely because it requires the least of them: the initial surprise, a few drop-ins to film the necessary demolition/design/construction participation, and then the reveal.
Celebrity IOU’s success at drawing celebrities like McCarthy—who appeared in the show’s first season to do a renovation for her aunt and uncle, Perusich’s parents—also stems from its ideal level of intimacy. Celebrities are asked to share their relationship with someone important to them, but they don’t have to allow cameras into their own house, or really into any aspect of their life other than the fact that they care about someone and are going out of their way to help them. It presents celebrities as charitable and human, but without being invasive, and giving them space to perform without feeling like the spotlight is on them. The renovation focus also means that celebrities can spend more or less time on set as necessary: Brad Pitt, for instance, spent less time hanging around the job site when he organized a renovation for his longtime makeup artist than Darren Criss spent helping his manager, because the latter has more need for the screen time.
In shifting to her own show, McCarthy is more or less following the same themes. The Great Giveback is about people submitting their loved ones for a makeover based on being deserving, with McCarthy and Perusich stepping in to design and renovate the space for them. In the premiere, they lay on the emotional dimensions swiftly, as they work for a pregnant war veteran and her fiance as they prepare for baby’s arrival. However, it’s a concept that doesn’t require McCarthy’s celebrity to function, as there’s more than enough story in a veteran who suffered from PTSD and fell into homelessness to sustain the basic narrative flow of a home renovation show: initial consultation, design plans, renovation hiccups, special projects, and then the reveal. Unlike the other celebrity shows, which rely somewhat on the idea that these people are special for what they’ve done for a celebrity personally, the narrative hooks here are much more general and similar to what you see across other HGTV programming.
Accordingly, McCarthy’s celebrity is trapped in a weird liminal space. On the one hand, she is clearly an Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning actress, and veteran Katie has not one but two personal anecdotes surrounding her—she watched episodes of Gilmore Girls with her Mom over the phone, and as an aspiring comic while in the military she swore to her fellow soldiers when she saw Bridesmaids that she’d meet her one day. In those moments, the show leans into the novelty of a famous person being in their space, even though McCarthy has no specific personal connection to them—she listens attentively to their story and offers her beliefs that mental health is crucial and we don’t do enough to support veterans, but technically in this scene she could be anyone and the narrative would remain essentially the same.
Most of the time, though, Melissa McCarthy is just the co-host of a home renovation show, which admittedly feels uncanny at times. In the introduction of the episode, they suggest that she and Perusich have been renovating homes for family and friends as though they run a business, but there’s not a lot of evidence provided to support this pretense, and while they have scenes at a “Design Studio” it feels much more like just someone’s house they rented for the purposes of the show. Perusich does carry a few of the procedural renovation scenes—an adjustment to the design on site, the stripping of furniture for a nursery—solo, but McCarthy is present at all the big moments, along with the usual shopping trips and design discussions that allow McCarthy to riff as McCarthy does.
And while she may be an Emmy-winning actress, McCarthy is also a naturally good HGTV host. She’s unable to hide her emotions, she has a careful understanding of the need to balance those emotions with humor, and she can sell the procedural bits and renovation talk without it seeming too forced. The Great Giveback does force things: there’s a runner about McCarthy rocking Perusich like a baby that gets a callback as the credits are rolling, there’s a whole conceit that McCarthy and Perusich found furniture on the side of the road that doesn’t pass a smell test, and there’s two different sets of talking heads—one set up as a fireside chat, as though it was added at a later date to bump up McCarthy’s screentime—to keep her presence known. McCarthy is able to wring out entertainment from even her husband’s terrible movies, and so it’s no surprise that she’s able to charm her way through the perfectly solid framework of a home renovation show without breaking a sweat.
It does feel strange, though, to see an A-list celebrity just hosting an HGTV show that isn’t about them. It naturally raises the question of why she would do such a thing, and the show’s ungainly title seems like the biggest clue: the way Perusich’s name is shoved in there makes this feel like it’s own form of celebrity charity, this time with McCarthy using her fame to help her cousin transition into home renovation celebrity. A look at Perusich’s IMDB page filled with cameos in McCarthy’s films and TV shows certainly supports this case, and you do wonder if McCarthy would play as big a role in future seasons, or if she’ll potentially be around less in certain episodes in this six-part season depending on her schedule. The premiere absolutely plays off the idea that this famous person is just a normal HGTV host, and the capital that carries, but that is…not actually true, and there’s a point at which that fantasy probably has to break.
But until then, Melissa McCarthy is just having fun helping people and playing a different type of part, and that’s still kind of weird, but also perfectly amendable and charming, and a much preferable HGTV presence than most of their lineup of stars.
Episodic Observations
In another weird bit of reality celebrity overlap, they visit Lauren Conrad’s The Little Market, which is natural for the mission of the show as a non-profit business, but also lends an extra bit of wattage to the affair.
I’m curious how they edit the homeowners’ reaction to McCarthy as they move forward: they obviously want the reveal to be a big part of the show, but it can’t be too big a part, and they have the manage the awkwardness of Jenna having to introduce herself since these people have no idea who she is.
For the record, my money for the single worst HGTV hosts are the Boise Boys, who should simply not be allowed on television if they’re that terrible at the basic task of narrating the process of a home renovation. Nails on a chalkboard.
Unrelated, but it’s interesting to see HGTV running a Pride campaign talking about inclusivity when you consider the absolute dearth of queer people that appeared on the channel’s biggest program of the past decade, Fixer Upper. I’m also curious if the Magnolia Network, where Chip and Joanna Gaines moved and which is now out from under Discovery’s control amidst the merger with Warner Bros., has been running a similar Pride campaign after the Gaineses made a big deal about the shift in inclusiveness on their new channel.
In case you were wondering, yes, I did write this while procrastinating from writing an article about HGTV’s erasure of the pandemic that’s due next week, how did you guess?
Discovery+ also launched Celebrity IOU: Joyride in 2021, which drew two more Oscar winners—Renee Zellweger and Octavia Spencer—who gave the people they cared about car makeovers? I guess? What a time to be alive.
Same. We guess the year of the show based on David’s neck tattoos.
When I saw McCarthy's name in the title, I was worried this would be an article about her and her husband moving from terrible movies to (probably) terrible TV shows this week, with what looks like a rip-off of the first season of Miracle Workers.