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Hannah Engler Harvey | Longreads | July 30, 2026 | 3,927 words (14 minutes)
In the long, slow days of August, Christmas comes. The halls are decked with vintage glass holiday towns in two colorways, Pastel and Traditional. They are lit by a wall of electric candles whose realistic dancing flames were designed by Disney Imagineers. (Inventory is getting low in Beige, but consider the White as an alternative; Plum could pull double duty for Halloween.) Smiling people wear sweaters embellished with stars and snowflakes. They moan with pleasure as they sample handmade caramel marshmallows and defrosted barbecue ribs and special-edition three-and-a-half pound cheesecakes, on sale for $56.00 or three easy payments of $18.67. (But move fast: There are fewer than 750 left in Strawberry.)
It’s nice here, safe as a daydream. In the pretend kitchen, with the make-believe food and the fireless flames, there is something for everyone.
The first thing to know about QVC, the most important thing, is that it is always on.
My best friend Lizzie and I are couch potatoes, dedicated ones; our friendship set, like a custard, in front of the television. At first it was The Real Housewives and 30 Rock, then Difficult People and Dancing with the Stars. When we first moved in together, when we were both 24, we resolved, initially, to shake ourselves out of this instinct. I had just gone through my first adult breakup. She had finally had enough of her roommates and of Brooklyn. It was early 2020, the year of broken leases.
Hannah Engler Harvey’s first Longreads story, “Beloved Bother,” won the 2026 ASJA Writing Award in the First-Person Essays category.
We found a place in a neighborhood we both loved, and ignored the fact that the door of the bathroom could not open past the toilet, and that Lizzie had to climb over her bed to get to her closet. It didn’t matter that it was small, we reasoned. We would never be there.
Two weeks after we moved in, the city shut down, and we started paying for cable.
What it boiled down to was this: If you watch enough television, you eventually get sick of deciding what to watch. The beauty of TV, for the true couch potato, is when it comes and finds you: the sick-day marathons of Intervention, the late-night reruns of Frasier and The Nanny, the reliable Sunday-afternoon showing of the movie Backdraft. This is what Lizzie and I had loved about television growing up, and this is what the prestige-TV era had taken from us. We were sick of ordering à la carte. We wanted a buffet.
So, there on our pink Drew-Barrymore-for-Walmart sectional, balancing takeout containers on our laps, we watched.
We watched old episodes of Match Game and Three’s Company; we watched Live with Kelly and Ryan and the movie channels and sports, if we were desperate.
But there were times—the true couch potato always finds times—when the only thing to watch was QVC.
QVC (which stands for Quality, Value, Convenience) was founded in 1986 by the businessman Joseph Segel and still airs 24 hours of programming a day, approximately 20 hours of which are live broadcasts. The broadcasts are simple in structure. A host demonstrates products in an unscripted, conversational way, speaking directly to the audience from a set that looks like a living room. Sometimes, the host banters with a cohost. Along the way, they are joined by a rotating cast of brand representatives who are there to assist in selling their wares.
And this tactic has worked, at least on some tranche of the population. For the 40 years it has been around, QVC’s core demographic—women over 50—has held steady, and the channel has a remarkable ability to inspire loyalty. According to a 2021 article in Main Line Today, the newspaper local to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where QVC is headquartered, “Ninety percent of QVC customers are of the repeat variety.”
The personalities are the point. In a 2006 article in Studies in Popular Culture, Jennifer Courtney and Gabriel Wettach wrote that QVC’s innovation, as well as its biggest challenge, was to make its advertisements seem less like corporate directives and more like recommendations from friends or peers. “To create and maintain credibility with the audience,” they write, “QVC hosts must emphasize roles that convey authenticity, such as mother, beauty expert, or bargain hunter. . . . viewers must be able to trust or ‘relate to’ the host; invoking trusted personas creates a welcoming and reassuring environment.”
We are all living inside the world that QVC made, the commingling of identity and acquisition.
Twenty years later, this insight about the power of QVC hosts could be applied to far greater swaths of the consumer economy. Today’s Instagram influencers talk about how and when they use certain products in the same relatable way the hosts on QVC do. Shopping is integrated into most online and IRL experiences. We are asked to place things in context, imagine the lives we would have and the people we would be if we could only own the right items.
When I talk about QVC, people are baffled by my interest in it. To them, it seems like a relic, something whose relevance is shriveling up. On the contrary: We are all living inside the world that QVC made, the commingling of identity and acquisition. We occupy our homes like amnesiacs, trying to figure out who we are by looking around at what we own.
For me, QVC applies an unexpected salve to the wound it caused. I am too young for bladder-leak underwear or anti-crepe elbow cream; I have no lawn for ornaments or freezer space for a four-pound bag of pot stickers. Like most people my age, conditioned to view themselves from a distance, I have spent a lot of time curating my life: my physical space, my wardrobe, my media diet. All my algorithms are tuned to perfection. In other words, I spend so much time within a prison of my own preferences that it has become a relief to be offered things I would never want.
To talk about what QVC is does very little to illustrate the experience of watching QVC, which is altogether more difficult to pin down. The sets are vividly lit, the people arranged like pints of ice cream in an illuminated freezer. For as long as I’ve been watching, the main set has been dressed with a bright yellow couch, glossy gray-brown laminate floors, and faux windows that look out onto a digital lawn. The artifice of the environment is in charming tension with flickers of helpless realism: a rep from Roberta’s Unique Gardens who struggles to lift a planter full of SunPatiens; a host whose Barefoot Dreams cardigan keeps rubbing against her mic. There is a hallucinatory quality to it: The brightness is the same at 8 in the morning and 11 at night. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to when they present certain products, whether they’re selling perennial plants or seasonal decorations or Beekman 1802’s goat milk skin care. (The reps from Beekman often bring a flock of real baby goats with them.) But there is also a groundedness, a kind of ruthless maternal practicality: Faroe Islands salmon is full of Omega-3s, which reduce triglycerides, crucial as we approach middle age. Elastic-waist pants are a godsend if you fluctuate sizes.
The presentations follow predictable, elliptical patterns; they are designed to be half-watched, for viewers who are flipping channels, or maybe falling asleep. The hosts repeat themselves—they must—revisiting colors, sizes, quantities, and prices every couple of minutes, the repetition contained within the steady stream of good-natured patter. The consistency of this patter is remarkable; to be able to just keep talking, no matter how boring the topic or useless the product, can be downright impressive to watch. A host might say all of these things and more during the course of an hour-long presentation on espadrille sandals: The weather is getting warmer, those outdoor barbecues are around the corner, days are getting longer, patio dining is here, summer is showing its face, it’s iced coffee season, it’s frozen margarita season, it’s baseball season, the weather is warming up. Sometimes it devolves into silliness. “Belts are really trending right now,” said designer Susan Graver on QVC3 the other morning. “Oh, I love to put one on.”
At first, we entered this world like anthropologists, observing the bizarre habits of the native species. But we soon became attached to its familiar rhythms. Lizzie developed a habit of turning it on in the morning and keeping it on in the background through a day of working from home or cleaning the house, and this routine lingered long after the acute phase of the pandemic began to wane. Certain things about our lives had changed for good. Never again would we go into the office five days a week, and never again would a day pass without the ambient, almost meditative thrum of QVC—not exactly white noise, but maybe ecru, or eggshell.
In other homes, in other cities, we learned, other women were doing the same thing. Longtime QVC customer Arlyn David—a 62-year-old resident of Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania—told Main Line Today in 2021: “If I’m home, I have it on.”
All my algorithms are tuned to perfection. In other words, I spend so much time within a prison of my own preferences that it has become a relief to be offered things I would never want.
QVC pioneered a new type of television programming, shopping and entertainment churned together in one comfortable swirl. But the entertainment is of a specific type: It provides something that Lizzie and I sometimes call “The Voices.” The Voices could come from a podcast, or from scrolling on TikTok; the point is that they give a restless mind something to do between bouts of more concentrated thought, like psychological chewing gum.
I have spent the last few years learning about how my generation’s attention spans have been torched by social media and smartphones and how our minds now require constant stimulation in order to function. But Arlyn David and her ilk are proof that the desire for The Voices predates millennial dopamine addiction by decades at least. What does the everpresence of QVC do for them?
Whenever I ponder this, I think of the house I grew up in, set back into trees at the end of a cul-de-sac, in an American suburb that thundered with silence. Perhaps The Voices answer a deeper, more basic human desire: the urge to fill a quiet house with conversation, no matter how inane.
Like friendship, QVC has its own vernacular, formed over years and opaque to outsiders. For example: Weighty, substantial fabrics are sometimes referred to by hosts as “beefy.” Host Leah Williams was, by her own account, the first person to use this term. Then QVC stalwart Isaac Mizrahi borrowed it, and then his reps started using it when they went on for their presentations, spreading it back to the hosts. So everyone calls things “beefy” now, usually crepe pants or wool-acrylic blend sweaters. Another one: Cotton has “a dry hand.” This means that when you run your hand over the fabric, it feels dry to the touch, not slick and smooth like a synthetic blend. Fabrics that have a dry hand are cooler and less clingy on the body.
The colors on QVC have beautiful and evocative names, like Butter Rum, Flame, Celebration Pink, Nantucket Blue. Sometimes, when color names are too highfalutin, conflict occurs. The brand rep from the QVC brand Denim & Co. is always going at it with host Amy Stran over this. “This one is called Heather,” he’ll say, and Amy will rush in to offer an alternative: “But it’s really not gray at all, more like a beautiful smoky purple, a lavender.” Then, next time they go through colors, she’ll say, “This one is called Heather, but remember, think lavender.” Amy is very serious about colors. It really pisses her off when brands call black “onyx” or gray “silver.” She probably assumes it will confuse the customers. She is probably right. Whenever these tiffs would happen, Lizzie and I would lean forward over our knees, eager to see the two of them go at it.
If you watch enough, you start to notice these tensions; you become a scholar of them. Lizzie and I are fandom members of the country’s longest-running reality show. The faces of the hosts unfurl themselves under our unrelenting gaze, revealing an ill-advised spray tan, an early pregnancy, plastic surgery, dead teeth. QVC has deepened the language we share with each other, created a shared set of references, in the same way that going to college together did, or the time when we were both AMC A-Listers. It has become more than brainless viewing. It is a hobby.
We have the festering snobbishness of transplants. New York City is our home, but our impossible aspiration is to have never lived anywhere else.
There is even a subreddit dedicated to making fun of QVC personalities and their quirks: r/QVC_Snark. It is a community of insiders. The Redditors attack with the vicious specificity that only intimacy can produce. “Why is her head a literal box?” asks a recent poster, sharing a photo they took of host Courtney Khondabi on their TV screen. Or, of host Rick Domeier: “Rick has been wearing the same jeans for weeks now!” They make fun of the prices, usually during the food presentations ($100 hot dogs, $11 per 6 oz. piece of salmon) and the clothing segments (LOGO by Lori Goldstein is a popular punching bag: “All this needs is some lace and a ‘wide load’ banner across the ass”).
During the three years we lived together, Lizzie and I spent countless evenings performing QVC-themed comedy routines for an audience of one, doing spittakes with our wine, high on the feeling of being clever and understood. But we only discovered r/QVC_Snark later, after we were living on opposite sides of Manhattan. All this time, here were our people! One night I sent her a series of posts I collected during a lurking session, wishing I could see her reaction. After a few seconds, she responded: “Nothing but you has made me laugh this hard since I was a kid.”
Redditors will be Redditors, but look, we are all supposed to be in this together. The hosts and reps are wives and mothers too (or the gay best friends of wives and mothers, or at least the closeted neighbor of wives and mothers). They are wearing the sweaters, using the hand cream, planting the perennials, or at least, they say they are. Part of QVC’s structure—a crucial part, in some readings—is the connection between hosts and viewers, not theoretical, but literal. Almost every live broadcast has a call-in element that allows viewers to speak on-air to their favorite hosts, to ask questions about the product, or, more frequently, praise it and announce their intention to buy more.
“Speaking with a host is, for many callers, a meaningful, seemingly priceless exchange,” write Courtney and Wettach. “Callers frequently divulge personal information, telling the host about illnesses, financial status, and family matters.”
It’s true; I have seen it. A recent caller told QVC personality Kim Gravel, in a voice thick with tears, that she had gotten used to “not feeling part of the world,” due to her weight, but that Kim’s clothing line had given her the confidence to participate in life. “That is your ministry,” said the caller.
I looked up. Ministry! It was such an extreme word, and even odder applied to Kim Gravel. (Boisterous! Brassy! The onetime host of a Lifetime reality show called Kim of Queens where she ruthlessly prepared young girls for beauty pageants!) The longer I thought about it, the more I found myself relenting. Anyone who denies the therapeutic value of clothes that fit has never had the experience of not being able to find them.
This is, perhaps, at the heart of my ambivalence toward QVC, or more accurately, my inability to see my engagement with it as pure ridicule or even a hate-watch. Every so often, I am startled with a reminder of who else is out there watching. Skechers presents a pair of sandals with hands-free slip-on technology, so that you don’t have to bend over to put them on. On the Over 50 & Fabulous program, the women from Breezies sell underwear designed to withstand hot flashes and bladder leaks. Where else can these items be reliably purchased, or so frankly and cheerfully discussed?
Onscreen, listening to the caller’s praise, Kim was nodding. She was clearly touched, or at least, she looked like it.
I sometimes imagine the person I would be if I took them all up on it. If, one day, a tower of packages arrived on my doorstep, containing Women With Control stretch denim, IHKWIP quilted tote bags, Clarks Cloudsteppers shoes, and silicon Cool Grippers pot-holder tongs. How would my life be arranged around these items? I imagine I would measure out the years in landscaping projects. My afternoons would be taken up by long car journeys, ferrying children to softball tournaments or play rehearsals, going to the grocery store and the nail salon.
I know women like this; I grew up with them. So did Lizzie. We have the festering snobbishness of transplants. New York City is our home, but our impossible aspiration is to have never lived anywhere else. We turn up our noses at the strip malls of our youth, and share our faltering moments only with each other: the secret joy of a Target where deodorant isn’t locked behind plexiglass, the frustrated desire to place groceries in the trunk of a car, the fizzy hedonism of a 44-ounce Diet Coke from a fountain. This, too, unites us: our aborted suburban futures, the secret panic that they may have only been deferred. Do we watch QVC to indulge these sublimated cravings for peace and comfort, taking furtive bites of soccer-momdom to keep us going when the subway is delayed and the rent is due? Or do we watch it to set ourselves apart, to reassure ourselves that we will never give in?
What happened within me when I cringed at the caller on the Kim Gravel broadcast? Why was my initial instinct an abstracted pity? Do I think I will never get there—never find a source of unexpected divinity, never be moved to tears by something ridiculous, that the material conditions of my life will never become more complex or more banal? Do I think I will never grow old?
It’s not true that QVC has nothing to offer me. I order my mascara from there, almost exclusively, three tubes for $40 when a single tube of the same mascara at Sephora is $28. Lizzie and I went halfsies on a MacKenzie-Childs teakettle (in the limited-edition Tattoo design) that we gave to a friend for her birthday. They have great prices on Dyson products. And some of the purses are cute.
We do not call in, of course. We order online, like we do everything else.
In April 2026, the QVC Group (which operates the three QVC channels as well as HSN, the Home Shopping Network) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, announcing that the company would be significantly restructured in an effort to reduce its debt (a process which included increasing CEO David Rawlinson II’s total compensation by 70% as they braced for impact). The shopping channels, they insist, will proceed as usual. Despite layoffs of over 900 employees in March 2025, the company says there are no plans for further cuts, and there will be no disruption to the flow of content upon which my fellow QVC-nuts and I have come to rely.
Still, there is danger on the horizon. Change is coming, and has been for a while. The 2000s have not been kind to the networks. There have been lawsuits: In 2000, the Federal Trade Commission barred QVC from making unverified claims about weight-loss products, such as the claim that Lite Bites items like granola bars and shakes enable customers to lose up to 125 pounds, and that Lipofactor Cellulite Target Lotion “causes measurable inch loss from users’ arms, thighs, and abdomens, without the need for a restricted calorie diet or increased exercise.” QVC violated the order, and the government sued in 2004. In 2024, QVC recalled 1.1 million pairs of Temp-tations oven gloves after customers reported burns caused by insufficient heat protection. The 2025 layoffs were preceded by staff reductions in 2023, and in 2020 during the pandemic, when the network also eliminated live programming on QVC2. Something has got to give.
Wouldn’t it be better for QVC to die with dignity, rather than contort itself to chase audiences it will surely never get?
The rumor on Reddit, at least, is that QVC will continue to invest in its social media platforms, working with fresh-faced TikTok creators while their seasoned hosts languish on cable, tailoring their product pitches to a richer, more sophisticated audience. The transformation has already begun. You can see it in the jewelry presentations (5-stone diamond eternity bands for $8,500), the beauty products (10-pouch boxes of ELEMIS Cellutox Herbal Bath Synergy bath salts for $262), and even the food (lobster tails, filet mignon tips, or 3 lb. of shrimp cocktail for $133). Hosts now talk about the lack of “chemicals” in their bagels, or the importance of building “hair health” with Dyson blow dryers.
Will this work? It seems unlikely. Lizzie and I are the only people we know who watch QVC, let alone shop there. When I brought up the topic to a group of women my age, half of them had never even heard of it. Wouldn’t it be better for QVC to die with dignity, rather than contort itself to chase audiences it will surely never get?
It turns out I am tender. I do not want QVC to change. There has been too much change already. A couple of years ago, I moved out of the apartment with the pink couch and into a place 13 blocks uptown, with a man who became my husband. Lizzie found a rent-stabilized one-bedroom on the other side of the park. I went back to school and made new friends; Lizzie started spending more time in London with her sister. For the first few months in my new home, I tried to watch QVC, but it made me sad: The Voices were still there, but the only voice I wanted to hear was a 30-minute subway ride away.
We reached that inflection point, that warped and curved surface upon which women friendships sometimes teeter. We are at the age where everything gets ruined. Still, we talk all day long, an unending commentary on whatever is in front of us. Our enduring closeness is an anachronism, but a beautiful one. We should not still be here, the way we are, but we are.
I suppose it’s a lesson: Whatever will come will come. For now, it’s August, and Christmas, and there is still so much to do. The flameless candles have sold out in Beige. The man from Bethlehem Lights is here to present his pre-lit trees, stately faux spruces twinkling with proprietary Color Prism illumination technology, 81 color and light combinations, the best time to purchase is now. Why limit this glittering joy to the festive season? Many customers keep their Bethlehem Lights boughs decked all year long: red or orange lights for Harvest Time; red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July.
But you have to act soon. At the end of the broadcast, the eight-and-a-half-foot tree (“their most popular height,” according to the rep) will double in price. Under the bright overhead lights, in their living-room diorama, the people onscreen peer out at me, concern on their made-up faces.
They are worried, but they can’t seem too worried; they want me to pick up the phone, but not panic. This is the beauty of it—of all of it, in fact; this not-urgent urgency, this solvable problem. This is why we watch. The deals are going away, but there is no such thing as an ending. Tomorrow it will be Christmas again.
Hannah Engler Harvey holds an MA in journalism from New York University. Her work has appeared in Longreads, Evergreen Review, Talk Vomit, among other places. She lives in Manhattan.
Editor and fact-checker: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
