On "Flipped Off" and Other Reality Shows, Houses of Horrors Scott Gries/A&E Russell Hantz, left, and his brother Shawn Hantz on "Flipped Off" on A&E. As spring house-buying season gears up, there will no doubt be a lot of talk about why home sales are sluggish, or at least not as robust as they used to be. Unemployment, low consumer confidence, tight credit and more arcane Wall Street metrics will all be implicated, but the real culprit is sitting blame-free in America's living rooms and dens: the television. Forget what the economists say; it's obvious that the housing market's plunge in recent years parallels the proliferation of shows whose main message is that only an idiot would buy a house. Someone could easily fill an entire network with all the reality shows that have been devoted to home buying and house flipping. Call it MPC, the Money Pit Channel. On MPC, pipes crack and foundations crumble at roughly the same pace that gladiators are skewered in the "Spartacus" franchise. And there's just as much hemorrhaging too, from the home buyer's wallet. The latest of these shows - and possibly the worst, though that's another story - arrives on April 28 on A&E and is called "Flipped Off." It features two brothers who are trying to make money by flipping houses in the Houston area. In the premiere, as on similar shows like "Flip Men" on Spike, they actually do make a modest profit, but that's not the point. The point is that they do so only after encountering catastrophic repairs that would cause an ordinary homeowner to call the arsonist-for-hire hotline. "Flipped Off" features Russell Hantz, who because he has been on "Survivor" has the mistaken idea that he's entertaining. Since he knows nothing about contracting, he delegates project-management duties to a bland brother named Shawn, who appears to not know much more about contracting that Russell does. In the premiere, their problems with the house they have just bought for flipping begin when they look in a toilet and find that something has been using it as a swimming pool. "I've got some bad news for you," a plumber is telling them minutes later. We're going to have to repipe the whole house. That's the kind of thing that can make a prospective house buyer decide that raising two kids in a cramped one-bedroom apartment isn't so bad after all. Of course the Hantz brothers might not have been so surprised by the $8,000 plumbing repair had they had the house inspected before buying it, since even the laziest inspector at least lifts the toilet seat lids. It's a lesson they could have learned from "Little House, Big Trouble," an episode last year of "Holmes Inspection," an HGTV program in which a contractor named Mike Holmes tells unlucky property owners that pretty much everything they could possibly imagine is wrong with their little pieces of heaven. That particular episode involved a woman who, like the Hantzes, had bought a house without having it inspected. "The whole inside of your home has to be completely removed," Mr. Holmes tells the poor woman, which is not an unusual diagnosis for this program. Mr. Holmes seems never to have met a house he couldn't gut. Pray this guy never stops by your place for a visit. He'll notice some flaking paint on a shutter, and the next thing you know, he'll be ordering up the kinds of repairs that can be paid for only by selling all of your stocks, cars and children. Mr. Holmes's many money pit companions on HGTV have included Drew and Jonathan Scott, another brother act, who on "Property Brothers" help people find and renovate fixer-uppers. Drew is a real estate agent, Jonathan a contractor with a fondness for computer-generated graphics that leave homeowners salivating over what their ratty new house could look like if only they would sink enough cash into it to purchase a small country. "We're spending more money every day than I anticipated, and I'm just wondering when it's going to stop," a homeowner named Pete lamented in an episode called "Run-Down Renovation," summing up the experience of almost everyone who turns up on these types of show. Pete had just bashed through a wall to begin the process of eliminating an awkwardly placed bathroom, only to find some of the home's plumbing inside, which then had to be moved at great expense. It's often unclear on the shows involving homeowners - as opposed to house flippers - who will pay for the repairs, but you have to think the programs give some sort of assistance, since Bill Gates couldn't afford the work a lot of these dumps require.