It was Monday night, and you know what that means: time for another roller-coaster episode with John & Kate. Yes, the spelling is intentional. TLC’s Jon & Kate are on hiatus as they journey to splitsville, but on HGTV, My First Place featured John [sic] & Kate, a Phoenix couple looking for their first home. And like their namesakes, the pair were in for a domestic drama that was all about The Way We Live Now. 

As I mentioned, our John & Kate were looking in Phoenix, one of the more distressed real estate markets in the nation. And as we’ve been seeing, even HGTV can’t wallpaper over the ugly real estate market anymore. In its old real estate shows, even as the market began to descend, HGTV portrayed real estate as a sellers’ market, with buyers anxious not to let homes slip away, and to escape the scourge of renting while they had the chance. 

My First Place is a new show, however, and in the 2009 market young John & Kate were searching in is one of foreclosures, underwater owners and cleared-out homes with secret stories of pain. The first-time homebuyers ended up bidding on two homes on the market (apparently) as the result of financial calamity: one a “short sale” by an owner who owed more than the house was now worth, the other a bank-owned (presumably through foreclosure) property. I don’t remember seeing either of these situations discussed, or even really acknowledged, on an HGTV show before this year. 

For all that, this is an HGTV show, which means there must be some measure of optimism, happy endings and a silver lining for the homeowner audience at home. In this case, John & Kate ended up in a bidding war for the bank-owned house, which they won after their Realtor encouraged them to bid over their self-imposed budget. Because as they just saw on their househunting journey, nobody has ever gotten in trouble stretching to buy a house! (They also, somehow, managed to get the house with a nostalgic-sounding 3% down payment.)

In the end, after a three-week wait for the keys from the bank, the young couple got their house (at, judging by recent price trends, a big discount over what the house would have been worth a few years before, in the cheap-credit era) and ended the episode with the traditional ceremonial toast. God only knows where the previous owners were tonight, or what they had to drink to. For this John & Kate, though, Monday night on cable ended in a tableau of domestic bliss. 

But just wait until they start filling that house up with kids.

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