Lifestyle
'Zillow Gone Wild' brings wacky real estate listings to HGTV
The Golden Saxophone House, featured on HGTV’s new series Zillow Gone Wild.
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The Golden Saxophone House, featured on HGTV’s new series Zillow Gone Wild.
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The real estate social media space is packed with influencers focusing on specific niches like luxury mansions, mid-century moderns or inexpensive yet promising fixer-uppers.
Within this crowded universe, Zillow Gone Wild is a place to go if you’re in the market for, say, a home in Kansas City, Mo., shaped like a UFO; a striking, angular residence in Kalamazoo, Mich., designed in the late 1940s by Frank Lloyd Wright; or a recently built cruise ship with close to 3,000 bedrooms. (Yes, there is an actual Zillow listing for this property.)
“Waking up to an ocean view in the actual ocean is the new best way to wake up,” says Samir Mezrahi, Zillow Gone Wild‘s creator, in his deadpan TikTok commentary on this particularly mind-boggling property listing.
Mezrahi’s prominent account, which has several million followers across platforms, has now been spun off into an equally wild reality TV show. The nine-episode series premiered on HGTV Friday, and is out now on Max.
As on social media, the Zillow Gone Wild TV show is aimed at a general audience and focuses on homes that defy everyday expectations in some way — whether visible from the outside in the architecture, or hidden inside as part of the home decor.
“It has to be something we’ve pretty much never seen before,” says Mezrahi, a former social media director at Buzzfeed, in an interview with NPR.
Setting a “wild” tone
The first segment of the first episode sets the tone: Homeowner Andrew Flair shows off the converted U.S. military missile launch facility in York, Neb. The unusual property has very thick steel doors and no windows.
The exterior of a home converted from a disused missile solo in York, Neb.
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The exterior of a home converted from a disused missile solo in York, Neb.
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“It’s all underground, covered in concrete, and if, for some reason, a bomb goes off, you’ll be safe,” Flair says on the show.
And in episode three, homeowner Kitty Reign tours viewers around the Pirates of the Caribbean-themed residence in Las Vegas she’s selling. This swashbuckler’s paradise comes with a decorative wooden helm (“Everybody plays with it!”) and a tavern (“Kind of our own little secret pirate nightclub!”)
Hosted by comedian Jack McBrayer, who played Kenneth in 30 Rock, the show features 24 homes from around the country either up for sale or recently sold. But only one of them will be crowned the country’s “wildest” at the end of the series, as assessed by HGTV executives. Viewers who correctly guess the winning home can enter a pool for the chance to win $25,000.
Kitty Reign and her wife, Jennifer, show host Jack McBrayer around their Pirates of the Caribbean-themed house, as seen on HGTV’s new series Zillow Gone Wild.
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Kitty Reign and her wife, Jennifer, show host Jack McBrayer around their Pirates of the Caribbean-themed house, as seen on HGTV’s new series Zillow Gone Wild.
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The judging criteria include creativity, commitment to a concept or theme and a quality McBrayer describes as “wackadoo.”
“That special thing that sets this property apart,” says McBrayer on the show. “We reward impracticality.”
The growth of an American pastime
Ogling real estate listings on social media has become an enormously popular American pastime in recent years. Saturday Night Live even did a skit about the trend in 2021. (“The pleasure you once got from sex now comes from looking at other people’s houses.”)
Saturday Night Live produced a skit lampooning the trend for browsing real estate listings on social media in 2021.
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Mezrahi, who’s based in New York, says he has long made a hobby of idly browsing Zillow. He started Zillow Gone Wild as a side project in the fall of 2020, knowing it would probably catch on. Mezrahi initially launched it only on Instagram, but soon expanded his offering to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and a newsletter.
“It was, like, prime pandemic. Everyone’s working from home. Companies are saying you can live wherever you want,” Mezrahi says. “So people are moving, thinking about moving, or browsing Zillow just as a bored-on-your-phone thing. So I kind of felt like there was an audience of people out there that are also doing this.”
The rise of TV and online channels devoted to home buying and home improvement, together with the increasingly elaborate social media presence of individual real estate brokers promoting their listings, have further fed the trend.
“This is a time when a lot of people are thinking about where and how we want to live,” says Zillow’s home trends expert, Amanda Pendleton, in an interview with NPR. “And these social media accounts captured our imagination and redefined what a home can be.”
“Wild” listings can be challenging for real estate brokers
That “imagination capturing” quality is what makes Zillow Gone Wild so compelling on TikTok and TV.
But when it comes to actually selling a property, eccentric architecture and festive home decor aren’t necessarily virtues.
“As a real estate broker, you kind of get nervous about that, because the resale value is not the greatest when you’re making it your own,” says San Francisco Bay Area-based realtor Ria Cotton in an interview with NPR. “It may not be liked by other people.”
Host Jack McBrayer taking in the sights of the “Golden Saxophone House.”
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Host Jack McBrayer taking in the sights of the “Golden Saxophone House.”
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While having a marketable property is preferable, Cotton admits the popularity of social media accounts like Zillow Gone Wild shows there’s a growing appetite among homebuyers and potential homebuyers for the “wackadoo.”
“I think more and more people are kind of bored of the cookie-cutter way of doing things,” Cotton says.
Case in point: An unusual music-themed home in Berkeley, Calif., that Cotton recently brokered, featured in Zillow Gone Wild.
The facade of the “Saxophone House” is dominated by two massive, gold saxophone-shaped columns. On the TV show, new homeowner Adanté Pointer proudly shows off the gold treble clef ornaments on the balcony railings indoors.
“The gold accents really make it stand out,” Pointer says appreciatively.
The smooth jazz vibes and bling of the Saxophone House might not be for everyone. But Pointer says it’s perfect for him.
“I am an attorney, and oftentimes, people come to me to make a statement on their behalf,” he says on the show. “And when you look at the outside of this home, it’s definitely a statement piece.”
In an interview with NPR, TV show host McBrayer says if visiting all of the homes featured in the Zillow Gone Wild TV series taught him anything, it’s that even the wildest of homes won’t sit empty forever.
“For every house out there that is just head-to-toe rainbow-colored, there is going to be a buyer. For every home that is attached to the underside of a bridge, there’s going to be a buyer,” McBrayer says. “There’s a lid for every pot.”
The Kennedy Center, the facade of which remains covered with a tarp, is seen in Washington, DC, on June 28, 2026. A US federal judge asked on June 24 for an explanation for why a tarpaulin continues to cover the facade of the Kennedy Center where President Donald Trump’s name was recently removed. District Judge Christopher Cooper gave the board of trustees of the performing arts venue until the end of July to explain “the purpose for and status of the tarp and scaffolding that Defendants have erected on the front portico of the Center.”
ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
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ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
More than two weeks ago, President Trump’s name was removed from the Kennedy Center facade though it is still covered by a tarp and the legal battle continues.
On Monday, a U.S. Department of Justice filing on behalf of the Kennedy Center included some surprises. The document was submitted in response to issues raised by lawyers for ex-officio board member Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio who is suing to remove President Trump’s name from the center and stop its closure for renovations.
Among the revelations, the Kennedy Center admitted that, during a board meeting on December 18, 2025, Beatty had been “muted and prevented from speaking.” It was at that meeting that the board voted to add President Trump’s name to the center. The filing later acknowledges the congresswoman was “prevented from voicing her opposition.”
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is a living memorial to its namesake. The guidelines for how the theatre complex spends federal dollars are very specific. Among other rules, it states that “no additional memorials or plaques shall be designated or installed.” Beatty argues adding Trump’s name runs afoul of those rules and that any change requires approval from Congress.
According to one of Beatty’s filings, “There was no advance notice in the agenda that the Board would be considering a name change,” a statement the Kennedy Center now does not deny. The center admits that, prior to voting, there was “no discussion about potential risks or downsides of the vote to adopt a secondary name for the Center.” Nor was there a board discussion “about any potential conflict of interest that might result from the vote.”
The center’s lawyers previously contended that if Trump’s name were to be removed, it would “lose money from donors who support” him and “impede the Center’s fundraising efforts.”
Closing for renovations
Earlier this year, Trump announced on social media that the Kennedy Center would close for two years for renovations. He wrote that he made the decision after “a one year review” with “Contractors, Musical Experts, Art Institutions, and other Advisors and Consultants.”
But, according to the center’s lawyers, Trump’s announcement “was made without presenting any plans, analyses, timelines, or funding information to his cotrustees and without any Board vote.”
The Kennedy Center has long denied reporting by The Washington Post that ticket sales plummeted after President Trump became the Center’s board chair. In Monday’s legal filing, the Center admits that, by October 2025, “nearly half of the Center’s tickets were going unsold.”
Paul Tremblay has made a career of pushing the horror genre – and the novel format – in strange and exciting new directions.
In his latest, Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep, the author offers an amalgamation of genre elements that can be best described as psychological-dystopian-science-fiction horror. It’s a mouthful, but the narrative does all of that and more in a way that defies categorization.
Julia Flang is a former semiprofessional gamer working two mediocre jobs she dislikes and living in a modest ranch house in a San Fernando Valley suburb with her retired uncle, whom she calls Uncle Fun. Julia likes movies and gaming but there’s little else going on in her life, so when her estranged mother, the CFO of a large tech company, contacts her with a possible job offer – a “once-in-a-lifetime thing” that pays handsomely just for doing the interview – she hesitantly agrees.
The job is relatively simple and perfect for someone with gaming skills: using a controller built into a phone to get a man, who is stuck in a vegetative state, from California to the East Coast. It will require her to learn how to control his body – walking, moving, sitting, standing, using his arms – so she can maneuver him out of the facility where he is located and into cars and planes and through crowded airports. A fan of movies, Julia decides to call the man Bernie – after the movie Weekend at Bernie’s. When the ethics of the job start to bother her, Julia realizes it’s too late and she must go through with it. However, she’s soon contacted by people interested in sabotaging the whole thing, people who, like her, don’t align with the shady interests of conglomerates and those set to make “gobs of money” from this new, somewhat inhuman technology.
As with every Tremblay novel, any synopsis barely scratches the surface. The novel’s chapters alternate between Julia and you (yes, you). Julia’s chapters are “normal” in the sense that they obey a chronological order and have action, basic descriptions of movement and places, and dialogue. The chapters in second person are like fever dreams from a shadow world; the desperate experiences of a man trapped inside his own body with no control of it, no clue what’s happening to him, and only a few fragmented memories of his life. Also, Tremblay uses a similarly fragmented style of storytelling (including words and sentences trapped in boxes and/or “moving” on the page) to keep things interesting but also confusing and creepy.
This novel operates on several different levels and – planes of existence? Bernie has a head full of AI that controls his body, but his consciousness is still there and struggling to regain control, struggling to remember things. There are monsters, leeches, mysterious rabbits, and eerie shadows in his world, but the true horror comes from the lack of control, from being moved around against his will and having no clue what comes next. Bernie is the embodiment of losing control to AI, and when taken together with the commentary of creativity and AI and the meta interludes in which the author takes a wrecking ball to the fourth wall and addresses readers, this is the best anti-Generative AI story horror has produced so far.
Despite the horror of it, this is a very funny novel. Julia is sarcastic and struggles to keep her comebacks in line, but the conversations she has and messages she writes are always entertaining. However, the humor is far from the crown jewel here. That title belongs to a plethora of big ideas Tremblay juggles. The nature of life, death, and consciousness, the evils of conglomerates, inhuman practices in the name of capitalism, and AI, and even what it means to be human are all explored here: “Is Bernie alive? Is he feeling pain? Is he experiencing everything as a prisoner looking through the bars of his body? Has his consciousness been winnowed to a metaphysical keyhole? Where does consciousness begin or end?” There are no definite answers here, but the way Tremblay infuses humanity, love, the importance of relationships, and humor throughout the narrative provides the kind of answers that can’t and don’t need to be spelled out.
A genre-bender full of big ideas that constantly switches between a world full of real or uncomfortably plausible nightmares and a bizarre hellscape in which loss of self, memory, and autonomy are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a horrific and terrifyingly disorienting novel that invites readers to consider a future that already started. Tremblay has always been an innovator, but this beautifully written collection of real and imagined grotesqueries cements him not only as one of the most original and exciting voices in horror but also as one of the smartest, most engaging authors in contemporary fiction.
Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @Gabino_Iglesias.
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