Hello, Friends. I’ve taken another turn around the sun, and my thoughts—inevitably—turn to replays of everyone’s favourite episodes from a dramedy I like to call ‘Existential Crises for the Elder Millennial’, such as What Am I Doing With My Life?, and Everyone Is So Much More Successful Than Me. This season I’ve also got a few new episodes lined up, including Will I Ever Stop Worrying About My Children? and Is It Perimenopause Or Am I Having A Breakdown? It’s a riot. Anyway, sometimes I just need to numb out over some exceptionally feel-good TV, and back at my place that includes QUEER EYE. Shall we take a look around?

Let’s not beat around the bush—this week’s letter is essentially an Ode to Jeremiah Brent, the newly minted member of the Fab Five who are now in their 9th award-winning series. Jeremiah joined as a replacement for Bobby, who left under some kind of spicy disagreement, and his talents broadly extend in the same direction: namely, home improvements. But to call Jeremiah’s gift (truly, there is no better word) a matter of ‘home improvements’ is to completely misunderstand the role that Jeremiah plays as a mediator between a person and their residence. He’s not just improving their house, he is transforming their life. I know this is what Queer Eye is literally all about, but I’m honestly not sure we quite saw it in any of the previous seasons.

It is rare for me to watch a show with so much emphasis on the aesthetics of a home as part of the prescribed glow-up, and see someone work so deftly and innately with the actual feelings of the space around them. I know that Bobby—as countless other interior designers have done, in other shows—talked a good talk about creating a ‘sanctuary’ and place to relax, somewhere they can ‘really be themselves’, but I never saw the alchemy in action.

Jeremiah is plugged into his (and everyone else’s) emotions at a high frequency. We know this, because he cries in every single episode. At one point early on during this season you can hear him choking on his tears, almost off-camera, saying “I’m never going to survive this show…”. The man weeps with goodness and tenderness for the people whose homes he bestows his magic upon, nimbly abled by a crew of 100+ people who gut, replaster, remodel, repaint, redecorate and entirely repackage a home in less than five days. I mean, obviously—the man isn’t lugging sheets of drywall and knocking out kitchens on his own whilst Karamo sits in a butterfly garden and tells people to love themselves harder.

Of course the wow-factor of the show is always laid on thick in the final reveal, which typically centres on the starry-eyed participant finally being taken back home after a week of French Tucks and eyebrow threading, where they get reintroduced to a home they barely recognise. I’ll tell you the most fascinating part about these moments—nine times out of ten, the one thing these shell-shocked people will point out with delight and awe are the personal photographs that have been framed and hung on the wall. They’ll have an entirely remodelled kitchen and their own bedroom for the first time as an adult, and they’re busy gasping at the photo of them with their deceased mother. This is how it should be. And this is what Jeremiah seems to grasp better than many others.

Jeremiah puts beloved photos on the walls, but he also puts their feelings up there too. In one profoundly memorable episode featuring a single mother called Jen’ya who had been a victim of domestic violence and sexual abuse, the Fab Five came in to help her at the point when she had just moved into her own apartment after being homeless and living in shelters with her young daughter. After the usual interventions with hair and makeup, Jeremiah takes her back to her apartment before the walls are repainted, and he shares a story about a book he read as a child featuring a little boy who drew the life he wished for with a purple crayon—the point being that at the end of the book, all the drawings came to life.

It is possible, in that moment of simple openness, to see quite how impactful that book must have been on Jeremiah’s own life. And then he asks Jen’ya to take a purple pen and write on the walls what she wants this home to mean to her, and what it needs to be for her daughter. The words will be papered over later that day, but his point is that the meaning—the intentions, the protections—will always be there. Love, joy, happiness, hope, faith… the words all go up in purple marker. It’s so simple. And it’s so meaningful. It completely shifts the way Jen’ya thinks about this place she calls home. By the end of the episode, both of them are kneeling at the foot of her (new, big, glorious) bed, sobbing. Jeremiah can barely stand upright again.

In another episode, they all come to help a community librarian who had let his home become an unloved dumping ground for books and clothes and a creepy number of scented candles. Whilst I had to chuckle at the idea of Jeremiah urging him to create a unique scent profile at a local candle making shop, the simple fact of the matter was that between them all they deftly lanced the boil that was festering in this man’s life: shame about his home. They all talked about it head on, and I cannot tell you how refreshing it was to see a group of men talk about the way that domestic shame holds you back. I know Karamo is positioned as the self-awareness guru, but Jeremiah is extending some healing all of his own making.

Did you know that the name, Jeremiah, comes from the Hebrew and relates to a man who was (affectionately?) known as the “weeping prophet”, which is so utterly perfect I squealed when I first read it. For what is Jeremiah Brent if not a weeping prophet for life at home? Like I said at the start, this is an Ode—we welcome hyperbole in this place. I’ll go as far as saying that he is, single-handedly, carrying Queer Eye forward. A lot of the internet backs me up on that.

What a joy it is to watch people fall in love with themselves and their homes, possibly for the first time in their lives. It’s an even bigger delight to know that, for some of them, joy is also written into their walls.

Every Friday I share a favourite song, poem, book, film, or other kind of cultural reference that evokes the feeling of home—and what it means to me. Let me know how it makes you feel in the comments below!

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