Living with Ed, Indeed
My wife's the cable junkie. Occassionally she scores. HGTV has a new series called Living With Ed, a reality show pitting the differences of a Hollywood wife with her Hollywood desires centered on comfort and image, and her husband, enviromentalist extraordinaire Ed Begley, Jr. It's not a bad show at all, as cable reality shows go.
What it does do in an exemplary way, though, is illustrate the entire thrust of the Home Effinomic approach to consumption reduction.
Seriously.
In a nutshell, Ed Begley, Jr. is probably one of the best known enviromental names in all of Hollywood. He's driven an electric car since '74. His house has a solar array -- a massive solar array, given the modest size of his house.
An example. He opens the first episode starting the morning riding a stationary bicycle. Simple enough, right? Well, he's attached this bike to some genset or another, and rides just enough to generate enough electrical power to offset the energy required to toast his morning bread.
That's dedication to detail.
As the shows continues, he holds a stopwatch to check the water/energy consumption of his wife's shower. A tour of the very modest house shows he keeps his Oscar above the catbox. He builds some of his own furniture out of reclaimed wood. Ed grows citrus trees and vegetables in the yard to concentrate his diet locally. He brings home rain barrels, hoping to offset his water consumption.
This show could for all these details be relagated to a mere snapshot of one person's dedication to the enviroment in general and his contribution to it, positive or negative -- were it not for his wife's part.
To her, the stopwatch is quite annoying. The catbox under the Oscar? Not her favorite feature of the house, but one she illuminates to reveal his decorating sense and the lack of space this family of four has to share. The fact he has indeed built furniture is quite frankly secondary to the annoyance of her having to keep her car on the street, since wood working tools clutter the garage. Yes, they do have edibles growing in the yard, but haven't eaten them more than once or twice, and oh, they're ugly. The rain barrel was uninstalled with a hacksaw.
The subtleties of their marriage become quite clear as they show develops. He is not unaware of his lack of aesthetic sense. He simply wishes more could realize the impact some very common actions have on the greater environment. And she is no slouch about his passions. In one show, touring a Hollywood McMansion for sale, she asks the realtor if the hardwoods adorning the floors come from endangered trees. She must have dropped a few of these bombshells on this mini-skirt house whore; later in the show, the realtor noted a balcony from the master bath probably had some "eco" benefit, like ventilation. More than snide, much more.
This is exactly the balance many miss. The Begleys embody one duality in their marriage, a duality usually separated by mutual animosity. Ed could learn from his wife's sense of style; barrels in the backyard need not call more attention to themselves than canker sores on a model's lips. Likewise, Rachelle has indeed absorbed important environmental detail most Hollywood housewives would only memorize if some of the power elite like George Clooney were to come to call. She had an almost invisible moment in the show house where she looked at the pool and wondered -- with genuine curiousity and only slightly tinged with contempt -- if it was heated with solar; living with Ed all these years, she would know that solar water heat would be an excellent place to collect cost-effective heat.
I hope the future episodes make more than an attempt to exacerbate this divide for entertainment value. There is real opportunity here. Ed might be able to install something in an aesthetic manner, perhaps invisibly. Rachelle might, like the inkling at the pool, might publicly defend her husband's passions with more than sarcasm.
I doubt it. It's basic cable, after all.
But hey, a guy can dream.