One crisis, the pandemic, shut down most television production at HGTV, this resulted, among other experiments, in a hurriedly commissioned gardening show shot partly by Martha Stewart-regal and spacey, talking to her peacocks-and by members of her staff. To spend time with Ruch and his colleagues, in the course of the past year, was to see an undaunted response to two crises.

“And the guy who lived with the bear!” Robert Wimbish, a senior director of programming and development, said. The executives then discussed a show called “Nightmare Neighbors 911,” and a concept that they began referring to as “The World’s Weirdest Realtors,” which could offer opportunities to feature oddballs whose pitches for shows had been rejected by HGTV over the years: a Realtor who specialized in polyamorous families a circus performer a Realtor-ventriloquist. The meth-lab concept, he said, deserved to be explored further, at another meeting. “And rehabbing a meth house is not easy.”

“So, ‘Meth-House Makeover,’ ” Katie Ruttan-Daigle, a vice-president of programming and development, said. The meeting’s topic was code-named Project Thunder. The meeting had been called by Loren Ruch, a fifty-one-year-old senior executive, whom one could imagine hosting a peppy, good-humored daytime game show. They were discussing unsafe content, or, at least, material that might be less straightforwardly comforting than the scene-repeated on HGTV, in slight variations, a dozen times a day-in which homeowners cover their mouths in shocked delight at a newly painted mudroom. One morning last June, a dozen executives at HGTV, the popular home-renovation television network, which for twenty-six years has offered content that is cheering and conflict-free-or “safe, tied in a bow, like a warm hug,” as Jane Latman, the network’s president, recently put it-met on Zoom to share transgressive thoughts. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

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