Flipping Out Just Does it For Me

I have a new favorite show. Flipping Out on Bravo. It's the newest in the house renovation reality TV trend, and by far the best. Why? I'm so glad you asked.

Before Flipping Out blew the genre out of the water, the best house flipping series was Flip This House (not to be confused with the lower-budget, personality-less Flip That House). Flip This House follows three teams of house flippers in San Antonio, Atlanta, and New Haven as they hunt for the best deal and quickest flip time. It's a fun show, interesting in the way that work is always interesting, and each team has their own "strong personality" to provide the essential red-faced drama. But there are two problems:

1. Everyone's always trying to do everything on the cheap.
2. The New Haven team is made up of a bunch of retards, one of whom is named Thad. Really. All three of them are frat boy ex-model football player dudes with a tanning bed in their office and a conversational style that necessitates repeating everything twice and then laughing. They spend the whole show taking their shirts off and talking about which one is taller, and their idea of a really brilliant joke is to throw a baseball through an intern's window, charge at him with Silly String, and then make him do pushups. Honestly. That's the best they could come up with.

Anyway, because there really is something enjoyable about watching a house being renovated, I put up with the total ass-whipping that is the New Haven crew. That is, until Flipping Out came along.

The star of the show, and the focus of all its ridiculously pleasurable footage, is Jeff. Jeff is a mid-thirties gay man with puffy lips and a talkative flair (to his assistant: "My pets are much, much more important than you." To his realtor: "OK, go ahead and fax that right over, and I'll just write a big FU on the top of the page, trace an outline of my middle finger, and send it right back, OK?"). He's got great taste, deep pockets, and OCD, which drives him to micromanage each hammered nail and pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into each flip. And then, of course, there's the je ne sais pas sort of crazy that leads him to consult psychics, fire and rehire his assistants up to ten times, and insist that every water bottle label in his fridge is turned to face outward.

At the end of the day, what really makes Jeff so watchable is that he's an asshole. He abuses his employees. He makes unreasonable requests of everyone he works with and constantly threatens to back out of deals. He has daily panic attacks. He finds, in any and every complication, the end of the world. In this and many other ways, he is the spitting image of a former boss of mine who shall remain nameless just in case she's finally figured out how to use Google. And I'm finally coming to understand why, when I was working for her, people used to lean into me with such a glint in their eye when I told yet another story about my horrific work day - crazy bosses (as long as they're not yours) are endlessly entertaining. Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly entertaining. Crazy bosses may even be more inherently interesting than house flipping, and to find them both so thoroughly explored in one attractively shot hour is a real reality TV miracle.

Thanks, Bravo. And if you're ever looking for a new show, I've got just the one. We'll call it Pop-Psychology Psychopaths, and it'll be all about whether or not a harried assistant can get a book written for a binder-flinging racist before the money runs out or one of them dies of a heart attack.