Welcome to Home Watching, a column about the wild and wooly world of renovation television from a self-proclaimed expert in the genre.

Reality television connoisseurs who had an abundance of free time in the early 2000s are intimately familiar with one of MTV’s beloved franchises, Cribs—a show that purported to take a look-see behind the curtain of celebrity itself by allowing famous people to show the most intimate part of their lives: their homes. The celebrity home tour as a genre was not new; Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous existed during the mid-1980s and ’90s in part because it was a bastion of good press for famous people to show off not only their homes, but their wealth. Cribs went off the air in 2009 after its 17th season, but returned in 2021 and now is in its 19th season. The current iteration feels a little more egalitarian than its predecessor. And even though the level of wealth presented is roughly the same, early seasons of the show depict a kind of celebrity that is now extinct.

In 2002, a glimpse of a celebrity’s house was rare enough to necessitate a five-minute segment on a reality TV series, but now, some 20 years later, Delevingne walks Architectural Digest through the costume room, ball pit, and vagina-esque secret tunnel in her palatial Los Angeles spread in a 14-minute video with 8.4 million views, and Vogue’s persistent and chipper 73 Questions series invites viewers to look around Taylor Swift’s cottage-y kitchen as she answers banal inquiries about her cats. Kim Kardashian, a woman whose life is largely content for public consumption, has shown the inside of her stark and minimal Calabasas home that she shared with her ex-husband Kanye West so many times (including on both aforementioned YouTube series) that a close observer might be able to draw a layout from memory. Though the divide between celebrities and plebes has always existed, it has now widened to a vast chasm; Delevingne and Kardashian’s homes are aspirational to most and achievable for a select few. It will always be thrilling to look at beautiful homes, but with the accessibility of celebrity on social media, none of it is particularly exciting anymore, if only because no one needs to be reminded of what it looks like for a person to have more money than they know what to do with: we are all the time.

The money shot of a good Cribs episode isn’t the expansive primary suite or the infinity pool—it’s the fridge, the last cornerstone of regular human life.

The show’s appeal is rooted in voyeurism; the blatant display of wealth that caught people’s attention in the early 2000s left an indelible mark on pop culture. (Among the more memorable Cribs home tours is rapper Missy Elliott’s undeniably garish Miami condo with a custom Ferrari-shaped bed and a chair with built-in fish tanks for armrests.) But its lasting intrigue lies in the small moments where celebrities let their humanity show. The money shot of a good Cribs episode isn’t the expansive primary suite or the infinity pool—it’s the fridge, the last cornerstone of regular human life. Peeking into the very normal refrigerators of famous people of yore is refreshing: a Sub-Zero fridge that’s cleverly concealed opens to reveal a very normal jumble of takeout containers, half-empty jugs of orange juice, and mystery Tupperwares containing the ghosts of meals past. How nice to have a reminder that stars can actually be just like us, even if there are more differences than similarities.

While the newer Cribs episodes don’t do away with this tradition, the results are slightly more depressing. In the second episode, singer Nicole Scherzinger’s refrigerator and accompanying pantry takes a page out of the Khloe Kardashian school of home organization, with juices and yogurts arranged in tight formation. The various drawers and shelves of Scherzinger’s pantry that contain dry goods are as well-stocked and organized as the kitchen of an upscale coworking space. (A regular household doesn’t need drawers full of teabags and protein bars, but if you can have it, why not?) The abundance is a feature, not a bug, but the lack of any discernible signs of life makes the entire enterprise feel more like a showroom than a home.

Some of the other flourishes in Scherzinger’s L.A. home are definitely fancy, but not unachievable. (A waterfall marble kitchen island looks nice, but you can find it on HGTV, too.) In that same episode, viewers see inside the Nashville residence where former NFL player Eric Decker and his wife, country-pop singer Jesse James Decker, live with their family, which at over 13,00 square feet is remarkable for its sheer size, but little else.

The fourth episode reveals where Adrienne Bailon—one of the titular little women in the early-2000s girl group 3LW and talk show host on The Real—lives with her husband, singer-songwriter Israel Houghton in an impeccably clean and sterile house in Beverly Hills, decorated in an astonishing array of cream, oatmeal, ecru, and white. “I enjoy seeing myself naked,” she says while standing in front of the full-length mirror in her primary bathroom. Guests taking advantage of their lovely swimming pool dry off with towels that read “Villa Houghton, Beverly Hills 90210.” The vibe is “Live, Laugh, Love” in spirit but much bougier in execution and is just enough to suggest what this couple might be like once the cameras are gone. Without that tiny hint of personality, the Houghtons’ pristine living space feels as soulless and empty as the mansions featured on Selling Sunset, a blanding of aesthetic personality that has largely come with the mass consumption of wealth.

It’s not that these celebrities who graciously allowed camera crews into their impeccable homes are doing it wrong—there’s no “right” way to undergo this process, because it is unique to the individual. But the celebrity homes featured in the early seasons of the show are varied enough in execution to be interesting. A 2002 Cribs episode features musician Rob Zombie’s house—an unassuming Tudor tucked away somewhere in L.A.’s labyrinthine sprawl. Inside, what might have been shocking at the turn of this century now reads as quirky and a little quaint. A taxidermied polar bear lurks in the corner of his living room, which also houses a Chinese wedding bed and an old-fashioned electric chair. The primary suite was designed to look like, per Zombie himself, “the Haunted Mansion and a cheap whorehouse.” The results are deliciously tacky in a way that feels fun—a leopard print rug and heavy, flocked wallpaper dominates the space, while a mural on the ceiling depicts a “stormy sky.” A guest bedroom appears to have a popcorn ceiling painted entirely purple.

Comedian Kathy Griffin’s 2001 house is covered in art that is cheerfully ugly, picked not for how it would blend in with a design plan, but because she liked it. In entertainer Wayne Newton’s enormous palace in the Las Vegas desert, the grand staircase in the white marble foyer has crystal balustrades, but there’s Cool Whip in his fridge. Former Sum 41 drummer Steve Jocz lives in his parent’s house in Ajax, Canada, and leads the camera crew through a pleasantly suburban tract home decorated by his mother, a woman with a penchant for teddy bears as decor. It might not be the kind of house that you fantasize about, but it feels like home.

Top photo courtesy of MTV.

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