What is ‘real’ on Homestead Rescue?

While Homestead Rescue has come under fire for staging things for the cameras, the show’s hosts seem to be portrayed fairly accurately on the show.

The debate over whether we can consider reality television ‘real’ is just as old as the genre itself and this debate will also likely continue until the genre dies out one day.

But even though few fans are naïve enough to believe that their favorite reality television shows are completely authentic these days, it is always helpful to consider which aspects of your favorite shows have “stretched” the truth a little further than others.

The truth about Homestead Rescue’s transformations

The reality is that Homestead Rescue, just like any other show on television, often needs to condense days’ worth of footage to fit into just one 40-ish minute episode.

And while this means that we viewers can watch their incredible homestead transformations in just one sitting, it also means that the show’s producers often have to employ clever editing tricks along the way.

And though Marty Raney (who hosts the show alongside his daughter, Misty, and son, Matt) has always maintained that they are “An Alaskan family that’s not faking it”, the “grown men” that he told Fox News cry in “virtually every episode” may not be quite as emotional as they are portrayed to be.

Or they might not be crying about what you think they are crying about (in the Zabecs’ case, at least).

So it might be best to take all the heartwarming homestead makeovers that you see happen on the show, with just a tiny grain of salt.

Homestead Rescue quick facts

Before we can dive into what is real, and what is not in Homestead Rescue, it may be helpful to take a quick snapshot of everything that the show has accomplished so far. This includes:

Marty is not a so-called ‘Lifer’

Whilst it is easy to imagine Marty learning all of his extreme Alaskan survival techniques at a very young age, you might be surprised to learn that he actually did not grow up in this part of the world.

Marty actually moved to Alaska as an adult in 1974 and spent his first few years working as a logger in the South-east before moving to Haines.

Fortunately, it seems like those first few months living in a floating logger cabin made quite the impression on Marty, as he has now been happy to call Alaska his home for over five decades.

And according to what Marty told Jaime Schwartzwald in 2016, he has really spent most of this time living off the grid on different homesteads.

The Homestead Rescue controversies

Homestead Rescue, just like most of Discovery’s other popular reality television shows, has come under fire for being staged or faked quite a few times over the course of its 10-season run.

The most notable of Homestead Rescue’s controversies happened all the way back in the first season of the show, when a couple named Kim and Josh Zabec reportedly sued the producers of the show, because the couple had reportedly been led to believe that the show would follow successful homesteaders, and not novices.

However, a different couple, Wren and Ini, was profiled on the show in 2018, also admitted that some of the details from their episode, including the pre-purchased logs which were used to build their cabin, and the bit about them ‘ignorantly’ using canola oil to fuel their chainsaw, were edited into the episode for some good-old television magic.

The one thing that Homestead Rescue participants can agree on

While it appears that some aspects of what we see on the final Homestead Rescue episode might be adjusted for dramatic effect, this does not seem to include Marty’s infectious can-do attitude.

Even Kim Zabec, who went as far as taking the Homestead Rescue producers to court,  admitted that Marty is a “fantastic guy,” who appreciated her love for the big tree on her property so much that he turned it into a tub for her to use after it was cut down.

And Wren and Ini, confirmed this later on when they told the Ozark County Times that “Marty is for sure an intense dude and very kind and caring” and that the entire Raney family “all truly came to help and are big-hearted, hard-working, real people.”