6
T I M
TAYLOR
Home
Improvement
1991–19997
TY
PENNINGTON
Extreme
Makeover:
Home Edition
2003–20128
DEAN
JOHNSON
Hometime
1995–
present9
ROBERT
VAN WINKLE
The Vanilla
Ice Project
2010–
present1
NICOLE
CURTIS
Rehab Addict
2010–
present2
MIKE
HOLMES
Holmes
on Homes
2001–20093
DREW AND
JONATHAN
SCOTT
Property
Brothers
2011–
present4
NORM
ABRAM
AND KEVIN
O’CONNOR
This Old House
1979–
present5
CHIP AND
JOANNA
GAINES
Fixer Upper
2013–20181979
This Old House
premieres.1980
This Old House
is picked up by
PBS. It premieres
nationally on
April 16.1980
Vila’s first book,
This Old House:
Restoring, Reha-
bilitating, and
Renovating an
Older House.1983
This Old House
wins its first
Emmy, for Out-
standing Talk/
Service Series.1973
Vila enrolls at the
Boston Archi-
tectural Center.
After, he starts a
home-remodeling
business.1977
Producers at
WGBH read
about Vila and
his wife’s home
renovation and
contact him.used my own stand-up material with con-
struction work, and I threw a guy like Bob
into it, thinking what if he had to fake that
kind of authority. Exaggerating things is
kind of a tool for a comedian.”
Does America owe the creation of Tim
Taylor to the emergence of Bob Vila? Allen
pauses for a second. “Without the show This
Old House, there would be no Home Improve-
ment,” he says. “But Tim Taylor isn’t Bob. Bob
is a nice guy, a terrific guy, and he knows a lot
more than Tim Taylor ever did.”V
ILA IS SOMETIMES portrayed as a
guy who deserted This Old House
ten years after its creation to pur-
sue a career in self-promotion. The story
feels pretty precious when considered
against the standards of today’s social-
media and self-promotion industry. To the
parochial PBS viewer at the time, it was an
unprecedented, somewhat unforgivable act
of ego to desert the home franchise, whereas
today we might call it a simple rebranding.
Some resentment remains. Sources at
This Old House, still on the air after four
decades, are reluctant to talk about Vila,
though it may be that most can’t remem-
ber him. Three decades have passed. The
show endures. Vila himself is often still
roasted on internet discussion boards forBobVila
Effect
being a man playing a part, pretending to
be a contractor.
For his part, Vila seems genuinely
grateful to producer Russell Morash and
the PBS experiment, forty years later.
“Russ always said we were just trying to
take the mystery out from what’s behind
the walls, taking apart the layers and dis-
covering the problems. Then it was talking
to people. When you have a background in
journalism, you know what the questions
are and you know how to get the answers
and how to make them simple and clear. So
that all worked out,” he says. He sighs. “I
mean, I did bring something to the equa-
tion. It was serendipitous, really. I was a
guy who’d studied architecture. I was pas-
sionate about it, I’d lived in Europe and in
Latin America, but I also had a degree in
journalism. Why wouldn’t I end up doing
a broadcast show about building?”
And why wouldn’t he move on? Vila
started on This Old House making $200 a
week. Appropriately modest for the show
that started out as an experiment on the
par t of Mora sh (who ha d prev iously created
Julia Child’s show and The Victory Gar-
den) at the PBS affiliate in Boston. After
a decade at the center of This Old House,
Vila was making $1,200 a week.
When he began making commercialendorsements (over the protests of his
producers), existing program sponsors,
like emergent Home Depot and Weyer-
hauser, started to pull their funding from
the show’s coffers, and Vila was forced out.
Viewers were angry with the change at the
time. Vila was sometimes cast as the greedy
diva, who’d tried to use his personality to
get money. In the rationale of the moment,
it was like imagining if Olympic athletes
were paid. We see where that’s gotten us,
like it or not. It may have in fact been the
last days of premium amateurism, a time
when people were expected to substitute
the cursory pleasures of fame for the possi-
bilities of monetizing any thing from them.
If there is Vila resentment that sur vives
at This Old House, it’s pretty camouflaged by
the wall of Emmys they’ve won in the time
since then. “Bob was a terrific talent, and
continues to be a name frequently associ-
ated with our show by viewers of the brand
even though he left the show in 1989,” says
Eric Thorkilsen, CEO of This Old House
Ventures. “Happily, with the introduction of
Steve Thomas in 1989, and Kevin O’Connor
in 2003, This Old House now has the largest
audience in its forty-year history.”
Vila, who’s called himself a capitalist
at heart, makes no bones that he wanted
more from the show. “It was a great placeThe