This one was about the existence of a show on HGTV named Bitch House. The host was a man who appeared to have been a werewolf college student dragged off some Florida beach during spring break, poured into a suit, and shoved in front of a camera. He wore giant sunglasses every episode. There was no explanation.
Every episode was the same. He would show up and tour somebody's house while they talked it up: how much they paid for it, square footage, time to the highway, backyard, last renovated in xxxx, bedrooms, bathrooms, home office, new roof, everything. They would be touring the house the whole time, just like any normal HGTV show.
Then they would gather back out in front of the house and there was a really tense moment where he would tell you if your house was a bitch house or not. It not, he would just kinda shake their hands and thank them for the tour and walk away.
Otherwise, he would turn to the camera and scream "BITCH HOOOOOOOOUSE" at the top of his lungs and make all kinds of crazy faces. Music would cut in and they'd start swinging the cameras all around and cutting to random clips from earlier in the episode as if they explained why the house was a Bitch House. (They didn't).
And this was devastating for the families. Upper middle class stay at home wives would cry on national TV. High powered business executives would try to fight the host and have to be restrained. The value of those specific houses would plummet overnight, never to recover.
It was a hit.
And the criteria for what made a house a Bitch House were never revealed. During marathons of the show you would inevitably get into screaming matches with your friends about whether this house was or was not a Bitch House, only to be proven right or wrong 7 minutes later.
Bitch House ruined lives. It was considered the most successful, most divisive, and most destructive show to the American psyche ever to air on basic cable. It ran for 4 seasons and was quietly put on permanent hiatus.
And then I woke up.
courtesy(?) of the party rock anthem guy (plz don't sue me)
Compared to the bizarre appeal of the show itself, the end of Bitch House is less frequently discussed. But after new episodes stopped coming, many Bitch House fans became zealous seekers of the truth about the show's "hiatus". They soon had their answer, which was eventually (years later) confirmed as fact by the show's creator and host, Dom Frowley: A long-form Youtube video created by a fan of the show which told a fascinating story about his communications with Frowley and his relationship with the show itself.
The two-hour video by this fan, a man by the name of Dave Crowner--known online by the handle "bHouseRealtor"--broke down step by step how he finally broke the code of exactly what it was that made a house a "bitch house"; thereby solving the mystery that drove the show's fans to watch each new episode so avidly. Far from being a coin toss with each house (which many Bitch House skeptics insisted), the system that determined the fate of a house, demonstrated by bHouseRealtor, was an elaborate scoring system.
His legendary description of how he solved the puzzle was given only 15 minutes in the video but revealed him to be a man with the skill and eye for detail of a Geoguessr master, but whose talents were focused on only one thing: connecting the dots between the frenetic bitch house "reveal clips" and the destiny of a particular house. The remainder of the video was primarily devoted to showing 15 Bitch House examples and how the system applied to each one, even going so far as to show a house that narrowly escaped "being bitched" by merely the existence of a functioning laundry room sink. The show's producers, contacted later, claimed that even they didn't know what the show's host was doing or why he insisted on certain clips being shown.
bHouseRealtor also revealed his motive for pursuing the solution: he wanted his own home to be featured on Bitch House. However, he said, after applying the formula he had spent years deriving, he discovered that his own house was, itself, a bitch house and so he hurriedly put it on the market and sold it, before making contact with Frowley. He included in his video emails he had exchanged with Frowley, wherein he described what he had done, how he had done it, and how Frowley's secret scoring system actually worked. The replies he got were terse, increasingly agitated, and finally ended when Frowley stopped responding entirely, without ever entirely confirming the hypothesis. The fact remains, however, that after bHouseRealtor sent an email suggesting that he would reveal the system publicly, Dom Frowley went on leave from the show and never made another episode.
Postscript
bHouseRealtor was careful never to reveal the address of the home he was living in while doing this research, saying that he wished no ill will on the "poor people who got stuck with [his] bitch of a house." Other youtubers claimed to have successfully doxxed the residence in question, but little attention was paid and as far as anyone knows, bHouseRealtor's former home was left alone by both the show's fans and by the fickle hand of the market.
Frowley, for his part, went on to produce other shows after Bitch House but none could touch the level of success that his first show enjoyed. I guess it just proves that fate can be a bitch sometimes.
