Home renovation on Australian television is bright, energetic, upbeat – at first glance, not at all the stuff of the Gothic. Australia's longest-running reality renovation programme, The Block (2003–2004; 2010–), exemplifies many key themes of twenty-first-century Australia's obsession with renovation: aspiration (linked to class mobility and wealth accumulation), self-transformation, and excessive consumption. In each iteration of the hugely popular programme, now entering production of its seventeenth season, contestants compete in pairs to renovate rundown houses, hotels, or other dwellings for a cash prize. The Block is a programme about property, aspiration, and improvement, and renovations on the show are, on the surface, inherently homely: the goal is to produce more comfortable, more stylish homes for an idealized Australian family. Space, architecture, and the home have long been key concerns of the Gothic (Aguirre 1), just as social anxieties surrounding property, ownership, wealth, and class have always supplied impetus for gothic narratives (Botting 4). Like the Gothic, The Block is a programme that dramatizes questions about and obsessions with property as a means of addressing broader Australian anxieties about housing access, insecurity, and the ongoing erosion of the Australian dream of home ownership in the twenty-first century.

The Block is not intended to be viewed as a gothic text, but nonetheless contains a great many elements that cleave to the traditions and tropes of the gothic mode.