Welcome to the Neighborhood (TV series)

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Welcome to the Neighborhood was an American reality television series produced in 2005 by ABC that was notable for the amount of controversy it garnered before it was aired. It subsequently became one of the few American TV series to be cancelled before airing a single episode.

The show was a contest to win a lush dream-home in an exclusive cul-de-sac in Austin, Texas. The catch is that the local families decide who will win, and while they are all conservative, white, upper-class Christians, all the contestants are not. The contestant families included[citation needed]

  • The Crenshaws - A religious African American family
  • The Eckharts - A Caucasian pagan family
  • The Gonzalezes - A Hispanic family
  • The Lees - A Korean family
  • The Morgans - A Caucasian family with a stripper mother
  • The Sheets - A heavily-tattooed Republican Caucasian family
  • The Wrights - A Caucasian homosexual family with an adopted African American son

The first two episodes were screened before a group of critics, who lambasted it for the prejudice the judges displayed. One judge openly claimed that he "would not tolerate a homosexual".

The still unaired show came under fire from the Family Research Council for concerns that "conservatives could come off looking biased", and from the National Fair Housing Alliance for concerns that the show violated anti-discrimination housing laws, which the show's producers have denied. GLAAD, with reservations, has approved the show's final message.

Possibly the result of its poor reception, ABC pulled the show from its scheduled July 10, 2005 debut, and as of June 2007 have not rescheduled it. Although FOX's new reality channel have asked for rights to air it, ABC president Steve McPherson has denied their requests, claiming moral issues with the very content of the show.

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The show's producers continue to claim that the show becomes much more light-hearted towards the end of its six episodes when they show "some eyes and hearts opening up, opinions changing and a community transforming." The producers' purported goal with "Welcome to the Neighborhood" was to discover whether a diverse family could be accepted into a white, conservative, upper-class, Christian neighborhood. Although the judges did eventually award the house to the gay couple, once the couple moved in one of their neighbors immediately put his house up for sale, directly citing the homosexuals as the reason why[citation needed].

German TV station RTL2 reused the series' idea in 2007 with a setting in Berlin, using the title "Willkommen in der Nachbarschaft" (an 1:1 translation). The show has met lots of criticism.[1]

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