'Treehouse Masters' Doesn't Get Off the Ground
TVWW's been more or less enthusiastic about all sorts of oddball subjects, from documentaries on the history of plastic to the migrating habits of eels. So when Animal Planet's new series on treehouses arrived we were all in, thinking it might just be a series as offbeat and unique as its subject, presenting all manners of hanging out, or getting hung up, in the branches.
Unfortunately, Treehouse Masters, premiering Friday, May 31 at 10 p.m. ET, doesn't get off the ground at all. It's got an earnest but cornball host, Pete Nelson, who presumably makes a living traveling all over the country constructing custom tree houses. His debut adventure takes him to Waco, Texas, where he builds a $100,000 folly suspended above the grazing plains for what looks to be a wealthy ranching family.
All apologies to Animal Planet, but they just happened to get the show in front of a TV critic who also happens to be an architect, and, in all honesty, the maiden Treehouse Masters project is pretty much an affront to architecture — and to tree houses, for that matter. It's an overblown mess of a ranch house, meant to be a family hangout to watch football, and not very imaginatively done.
True to the show's concept as an MTV Cribs for Arborists, or a Lifestyles of the Rich and Nesting, the Waco treehouse has a tiled bathroom, is fully electrified, and has a flat-panel TV screen on one wall. It's little more than a mini-McMansion that happened to get snarled up in a small stand of trees overlooking a pond. There's nothing magical or unexpected here, except maybe the overblown ideas of the Treehouse Masters producers or the bad taste of its owners.
On the upside, the B-story of the premiere episode has Nelson taking a side trip to Uncertain, Texas, to help repair a suspended fishing cabin that looks a wreck, but has had the tender care of its owner. He and his fishing-buddy group look as weather-beaten as the cabin itself, but there's a real spirit to their camaraderie, and the cabin has the authentic charm of an old lake house, with peeling paint and the mis-matched furniture you would expect.
Given the subject, you might expect the mojo and mystery of all kinds of eccentric designs built by people inspired by such structures — maybe a journey to where someone is living the Tarzan and Jane dream from the old Johnny Weissmuller movies (left).
The opening titles of Treehouse Masters tease and show glimpses of fairy-tale looking structures, and one that looks like a suspended white polypropylene pod with a mechanically telescoping trap-door stair as the only way up into it. Nelson's own treehouse is a rustic wood-and-glass box suspended outside his Seattle headquarters, so you know he's capable of much more than the cheesy ranch house in the sky.
Episode 5 (2-4 were not sent for review) gets us a little closer to an adventure, showing a writer's retreat built on an upstate New York farm. It's themed on a Thai Spirit House and has some genuine whimsy and heart. So maybe there is more branching out to come on Treehouse Masters.
For now, we're left with our introduction to the show via the Texas clunker, a bad idea tricked out to the max. And we're also still stuck with Nelson's cutesy nonsense as he closes with "people want to be in trees, and I really believe trees want people to be in them."
Yeah, maybe the trees do, but I'd like to have gotten their thoughts when the flat-screen arrived.