Home Sweet Home From DuVernay

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Ava Duvernay Is The Executive Producer Of What Show?

From Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated Executive Producer Ava DuVernay, “Home Sweet Home” will follow two families who lead very different lives for a life-changing experience. These families will learn what it is like to walk a mile in another person’s shoes, challenging racial, religious, economic, geographic, gender and identity assumptions as they exchange homes for a week and experience the lives of those unlike them. At the end of each hourlong episode, the two families reunite to share their eye-opening and life-changing experiences.

What Is Nbc’S “Home Sweet Home” Pitched To Audiences As?

NBC’s “Home Sweet Home,” in which families swap houses in order to see how their counterparts live, is pitched to audiences as a social experiment. But it’s one that unscripted TV has conducted before. Granted, past instances of this particular genre were significantly more geared towards provocation.

Indeed, both shows had one of their family members go viral, with “Trading Spouses” personality “God Warrior” ranting about the unholy things to which she had been exposed and “Wife Swap” kiddo “King Curtis” complaining about having his access to bacon restricted by his new substitute mom. “Home Sweet Home,” created by Ava DuVernay and produced by her ARRAY Filmworks shingle, is unlikely to cultivate similarly massive personalities. The interactions between the two families in an episode provided to critics seem studiously tamped-down, even as the standards of reality TV have grown somewhat less wild since “Wife Swap’s” heyday.

The episode provided begins with the Vasiliou family’s patriarch saying “I think no matter what culture you are, no matter what religion you are, we’re all humans, and we should all love each other.” This is not excessively complicated over the next 40 minutes. This fellow, who is Greek-American, takes up residence briefly with his wife and four children in the home of the Wixxes, a Black lesbian couple raising three children.

The Wixxes explore Greek Orthodox practices, while the Vasilious undergo a guided meditation while holding crystals. (Among the first episode’s chewiest and most well-drawn elements are the Wixx parents’ attempts to create new traditions, and their anxiety over having lost ties to ancestral foodways and religious practices, due to the rupture of slavery; the Vasilious, in their time on camera, have far less with which to grapple.) One of this episode’s four parents doesn’t believe it’s appropriate at least to speculate about alternative methods of building families.

The impulse toward constant reconciliation is a virtuous one, but one doesn’t need to crave a drag-out fight to acknowledge that there’s something dramatically inert about a culture-clash show that is all culture and no clash. The road to the Vasilious and Wixxes meeting is paved with mild misunderstandings, all of them rushed past in service of a larger sense of the families’ ability to come together. “We could talk for hours, just all the questions I have alone,” the Vasiliou family father says as the episode ends; it’s telling that we move on before these questions are delved into, having simply established that asking probing questions is a good thing to do when you meet people who are different from you, but also the same.

But some of DuVernay’s powerful curiosity and ability to transmute real discomfort into grace, so plainly in evidence in other of her TV work, is missing here.

What Did Nick Vasiliou Say In The First Episode Of Home Sweet Home?

“I hope that all of us come out of this with all of our unconscious bias removed,” Nick Vasiliou says in voiceover on the first episode of Home Sweet Home. It’s an impossible order for a reality TV “social experiment” to fulfill for him and the others participating in it, let alone for those simply watching at home, and to suggest otherwise seems naive. But his comment does speak to a wholesomeness at the core of the endeavor.

Home Sweet Home The Bottom Line A well-meaning, if not exactly challenging, attempt to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Airdate: Friday, Oct. 15 Creator: Ava DuVernay The families make a point of playing along. In the premiere episode sent to critics, both the Wixx family (a Black household consisting of moms Yndia and Ania, 9-year-old twins Soleil and Sanaiya and 2-year-old Zyaire) and the Vasiliou family (a Greek clan comprising dad Nick, mom Maria, 15-year-old Demetri, 12-year-old Luke, 10-year old Leo and 9-year-old Katina) try their game best to fit into each other’s lifestyles.

Even in moments like those, however — which on another reality show might have been framed as mean-spirited — Home Sweet Home stays firmly on the side of nice. Nick’s line about unconscious bias comes as a capper to this very scene, which frames it as a teachable moment. A picnic with Yndia’s father, for instance, turns into a spontaneous lesson for the Vasiliou kids on the concept of redlining, while a dinner with some Wixx family friends leads Nick to some soul-searching once he realizes that plenty of families do just fine without a dad.

It’s a lovely thought, if not a wholly convincing one; the cynic in me can’t help pointing out that a few days and a few planned activities amount to little more than a family vacation at an Airbnb. And while the kids’ experiences take a backseat to their parents’ in the narrative of the show, they do serve as a reliable source of adorable good feeling. It’s telling that the lessons the Vasilious learn have to do with understanding what life might be like for a Black, queer family, while the lessons the Wixxes learn are more internally directed — they don’t need to be taught what a white, heterosexual family might look like.

Not that there ever seems to be much risk of anything truly terrible happening on Home Sweet Home. Based on the first episode, the series seems premised on the sunny assumption that everyone on it means well, and even the clueless or misguided are trying their best. It may not be built for spikier conversations, and that’s OK.

What Is Ava Duvernay’S First Unscripted Series For Nbc?

NBC has set a fall premiere date for Home Sweet Home, a new series from Ava DuVernay, her Array Filmworks and Warner Horizon Unscripted Television. Described as a family social experiment, Duvernay’s first unscripted series will bow at 8 p.m. Friday, October 15.

Each episode will follow two families from completely different walks of life as they accept the challenge to explore a world unlike their own. Cameras might look at the food a family has in its refrigerator, which shows are cued up on their DVR or whether their closets on trend. At the end of each hourlong episode, the two families reunite to share their experiences.

“With Home Sweet Home, my hope is that audiences will find understanding, perspective and appreciation for not only the families featured on the show but with their neighbors in real life.” DuVernay’s TV credits include Netflix’s When They See Us, which she created, wrote, produced, and directed. Array Filmworks produces Queen Sugar, Cherish the Day, Colin in Black & White, Naomi, DMZ, One Perfect Shot and Wings of Fire.

Ava DuVernay’s Array FilmWorks Names Paul Garnes President; Producer “Takes My Dreams Off The Page,” Filmmaker Says

What Network Is Making An Abrupt Change To Its Friday Night Schedule?

The Peacock network is making an abrupt change to its Friday night schedule. For the immediate future, new episodes of The Wall will fill the Fridays at 8:00 PM timeslot. A family social experiment series, the Home Sweet Home TV show was created by Ava DuVernay.

Participants exchange homes for a week and experience the lives of those who are unlike them. The show debuted on October 15th and four episodes have aired thus far. To date, the first season has averaged a 0.19 rating in the 18-49 demographic with 1.35 million viewers in the live+same day ratings.

It’s the peacock’s lowest-rated series of the season. Home Sweet Home hasn’t been officially cancelled and NBC may get around to airing the remaining episodes at some point. Are you sorry to hear that Home Sweet Home has been pulled from the schedule?

That said, perhaps Peacock will renew the show.

Real Families Of Different Backgrounds Experience A New Way Of Life When They Trade Homes?

Real families of different backgrounds experience a new way of life when they trade homes, stepping out of their comfort zones to discover each other’s similarities and celebrate their differences.