The Big Picture
- This Old House, the iconic home improvement show, is returning for its 45th season with a renovation project to make a mid-century modern home wheelchair accessible for a young family.
- The new season will be the second without longtime master carpenter Norm Abram, who retired at the end of the previous season, marking the end of an era for the show.
- Alongside This Old House, the sister series Ask This Old House will also return this fall, answering home-improvement questions from viewers. Both shows will air on PBS and stream on the Roku Channel.
Venerable home improvement show This Old House is back for its 45th season. The show will return with a new renovation project starting September 28 on PBS. The grandfather of all DIY shows will return this fall with a new challenge; the renovation of a mid-century modern home in Lexington, Massachusetts to accommodate a young family, which includes a son who will soon need a wheelchair, necessitating that the improved house has extensive accessibility features.
The show will also face a challenge of a different kind; this will be their second season without longtime master carpenter Norm Abram, who had been a mainstay on the show since its first season in 1979. Abram retired at the end of the show’s 44th season as the last on-camera link to This Old House‘s earliest days. The new season will debut starting September 28 on PBS, and will stream on the Roku Channel on October 2. This Old House‘s sister series, Ask This Old House, in which series regulars Kevin O’Connor, Richard Trethewey, Tom Silva, and Jenn Nawada Evans answer reader-submitted home-improvement questions, will also return this fall; its 22nd season will air on PBS and Roku.
What Is ‘This Old House’?
This Old House debuted in 1979, as a production of Boston PBS affiliate WGBH. Originally intended as a 13-episode miniseries, the show chronicled the extensive renovation of heritage houses in Massachusetts; it proved so popular that it was renewed, and has been airing continuously ever since. The series was originally hosted by Bob Vila, who departed in 1989 after a dispute with the producers, stemming from Vila’s ads for a competitor of This Old House sponsor Home Depot. He was replaced by Steve Thomas, who hosted until 2003; the show is currently hosted by Kevin O’Connor (not to be confused with The Mummy actor Kevin J. O’Connor). One of PBS’ most popular shows, the series has produced a number of spinoffs, including the aforementioned Ask This Old House. A woodworking-focused spinoff, The New Yankee Workshop, was hosted by Abram and ran for twenty years, from 1989 to 2009.
This Old House was the wellspring from which all subsequent home-improvement series, of which there are entire channels of now, sprung from. The show also served to inspire the long-running ABC sitcom Home Improvement, in which Tim Allen played Tim “The Toolman” Taylor, the accident-prone Vila-like TV host of the show-within-a-show “Tool Time”, with Richard Karn as his Abram-esque sidekick Al Borland. Vila himself guest-starred on the show a number of times.
This Old House‘s 45th season will air on PBS starting September 28, and on the Roku Channel October 2. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates, and watch the trailer for season 45 of This Old House below.
