“Home Sweet Home” is a very different type of reality series that was created by Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated executive producer Ava DuVernay. Instead of the typical negative energy that’s often associated with reality shows, DuVernay allows her cast to literally walk a mile in their neighbor’s shoes. Each episode of “Home Sweet Home” follows two families who lead different backgrounds for a life-changing experience. These families will explore what it’s like to walk a mile in another person’s shoes, challenging racial, religious, economic, geographic, gender and identity assumptions as they exchange homes for a week and experience the lives of those unlike them. At the end of each hour long episode, the two families reunite to share their eye-opening experiences.
Rolling out spoke to DuVernay, during a press roundtable, about the inspiration behind her new series. The new unscripted family social experiment series debuts on NBC on Friday, Oct. 15 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
How does this series differ from the films you’ve produced before?
Usually I have a script. I have the actors. We’re going to rehearse. With this one, I was like, oh, you all are just going to act and do what you want to do? Oh, okay, I’ll just sit here and watch. Is this how this works in the unscripted world? I mean, [there are] hours and hours of footage of these people in each other’s homes that I’m literally watching on a camera. You can’t tell the kids what to do. I mean, I think some shows do tell them what to do, but we didn’t. It was truly, as you say, a voyeuristic experience where we are just watching these people live lives in these other spaces. It was a completely new phenomenon for me. It was uncomfortable at times.
What makes you love this show?
I really fell in love with the process. I really love this show because it is taking people as they are, and it is finding the stories in everyday behavior. I did the final edit on every single one of these [shows]. This wasn’t farmed out to other people. I really wanted to share what is in this show, which is “celebrate the differences.”
What was particularly important for you in bringing this series to life when it came to ensuring the you were aligning it with your brand?
I feel like we have a beautiful playground now as filmmakers. Ten years ago, if you were a filmmaker, you made films. If you were a TV maker, you made TV. If you were a documentarian, you made that. It’s really been in the last 10 years or so where it’s been accepted that you can do a little bit of everything. I have animation projects, unscripted projects, scripted projects, doc projects, narrative projects, and so I really wanted to get into the unscripted world. This is my first foray into it. Who knows how it will go. But it’s really saying the thing that I want to say in a different form.
So, when I thought about what would I want to do in the unscripted [world] and I was around the house during quarantine, I would walk around my neighborhood and be looking in people’s windows like, oh, what are they doing? Oh, they are home. I was just so curious as to how everyone was doing if you had the privilege to be at home, that is how I got to Home Sweet Home. We’ll see how it goes. I feel like it’s in line with the things that I’ve done just in a new form, a new genre.
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