TVSquad

This Sunday at 7 PM, you can tune in to Ty's Great British Adventure on ABC. In it, Ty Pennington, the host of ABC's popular Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, heads to the UK to do what he does on EM for a sleepy town in the UK. Except that this episode, which is being aired as a one hour special, was a six episode series in Britain. In fact, the series has had three seasons already; this one is from a year ago.

Ty said the biggest challenge for him was how polite and laid back the Brits are; he could barely get them motivated to get things done in his one week time frame. "Let's sit down to tea and talk about this," they'd say instead.

Is that how they were able to reduce more than three hours of UK programming to 42 minutes and change for the states? Cut out a couple of hours of tea and polite conversation? Or do they not think American audiences have the patience to sit through too many episodes of the same makeover?

Still, Ty took on a makeover project. He used local contractors and workers to get the job done. He did all of this within a week. Isn't that what Extreme Makeover: Home Edition does? I'll be tuning in, but I'd be surprised if this finds as much of an audience under these circumstances as it could under the EM title in the fall.

But if you are insisting it's alternative summer programming, then just import the whole damned series and bill it as a second Ty Pennington project the way FOX has Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares in different seasons for Gordon Ramsay. If it goes over well, you can now foot the bill for Ty's Great American Adventure and have him helping local communities.