The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Home & Garden Television is the mac and cheese of cable -- video comfort food. And, like that perennial favorite, it sells very well. Last year, HGTV was the third-most-watched cable network after ESPN and Fox News.

In a recent feature on the company, Bloomberg’s Gerry Smith attributed the network’s success to the “escapist appeal of looking at other people’s beautiful homes” in a year rife with conflict. “The relentlessly pleasant programming is a comfort, especially in hard times,” he wrote.

But there’s more to HGTV’s appeal than mere blandness. “It’s not easy to cre...