There aren’t many television shows that can trace their family tree back to 1979 and still find new ways to reinvent themselves.
This Old House can.
The original home improvement series has been knocking down walls, fixing plumbing and convincing generations of viewers that maybe they really can do that themselves for nearly five decades. Its companion series, Ask This Old House, isn’t exactly a youngster anymore either.
It’s turning 25.
Season 25 of Ask This Old House premieres October 1 on PBS before making its way to The Roku Channel October 5, where it will stream free.
And because apparently showing people how to fix a leaky faucet for 25 seasons wasn’t enough technological evolution, Ask This Old House now has an AI assistant too.
Yes. Really.
Somewhere between Bob Vila and artificial intelligence, television took one hell of a detour.
From PBS to Roku — Without Really Leaving PBS
What’s interesting about This Old House isn’t simply that it’s still around.
It’s where it’s around.
The original This Old House premiered in 1979 and became one of those programs permanently associated with public television. Ask This Old House followed in 2002 with a slightly different idea: instead of following one big renovation, the experts could travel around answering specific questions and helping actual homeowners with individual projects.
That turned into more than 1,000 house calls across all 50 states, two foreign countries and, for some reason, NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Because apparently even NASA occasionally needs a guy who knows what he’s doing with a wrench.
Then Roku entered the picture.
Roku bought the This Old House business in 2021, acquiring not just a bunch of old episodes but the shows themselves, their library, production operation and related digital properties.
The price? About $97.8 million. That’s a hell of a lot of caulk.
But Roku buying This Old House didn’t mean ripping it away from PBS and hiding it behind another streaming wall.
Instead, the shows have become a pretty good example of just how weird television distribution is now.
New episodes of Ask This Old House still premiere through PBS. Season 25 arrives there October 1. Four days later, it starts streaming free on The Roku Channel.
Meanwhile, decades of This Old House have spread across free streaming, on-demand libraries and dedicated channels.
Old TV didn’t die.
It escaped.
The Silva Anniversary
Season 25 is technically the silver anniversary of Ask This Old House.
The show has a better name for it: The Silva anniversary.
That’s for general contractor Tom Silva, who has been part of Ask This Old House since the beginning and remains on the team alongside host Kevin O’Connor, plumbing and heating expert Richard Trethewey, landscape contractor Jenn Nawada and the rest of the show’s current crew.
The anniversary season isn’t abandoning the basic idea that got the show here.
There are still house calls. There are still homeowners with problems. There are still people who know considerably more about electrical wiring than I ever want to.
Season 25 also brings back old favorites including “What Is It?” and “Cutaways,” along with a collection celebrating the “Best of the Boston Accent.”
Honestly, you can’t celebrate This Old House without the Boston accent.
The season premiere gets things started with Mark McCullough heading to New Mexico to learn about adobe construction, Tom Silva demonstrating a trick for cutting miters on imperfect corners and Jenn Nawada revisiting a landscaping project more than a decade after the original house call.
That’s the other advantage of surviving this long.
You can actually go back and see what happened to the stuff you built.
And Now There’s an AI Handyman
This is where 2026 barges into the room.
The anniversary also brings Ask This Old House Plus, or Ask TOH+, an AI-powered tool built around decades of This Old House and Ask This Old House material.
The idea is pretty straightforward.
Instead of digging through years of articles and videos trying to figure out why something in your house is leaking, smoking, cracking, sagging or making a noise that definitely wasn’t there yesterday, homeowners can ask a question in normal language.
Ask TOH+ then uses material from the brand’s articles, videos and expert knowledge to provide guidance while pointing people toward the original sources.
In other words, after decades of viewers asking the guys on television what the hell is wrong with their house, now they can ask the computer.
I suppose this was inevitable. But there’s also something oddly appropriate about it.
Ask This Old House has always been built around the same basic problem: I don’t know how to do this. Can somebody who does show me?
The delivery system just keeps changing.
First it was television. Then websites and streaming video. Now you can interrogate an AI about your busted toilet. Progress.
This Is What FAST TV Does Best
The Roku part may actually be the most interesting piece of this for me.
We’ve spent years talking about streaming as the thing that was supposed to replace television. Subscribe to this. Subscribe to that. Move another show behind another paywall.
Then FAST TV came along and started quietly rebuilding something much closer to television again.
Turn it on. Pick something. Watch it free with commercials.
And a franchise born on public television in 1979 fits into that world almost perfectly.
This Old House doesn’t require you to start at Season 1, Episode 1 and dedicate the next six months of your life to understanding the mythology of drywall.
You can land on an episode from 1997. Or 2012. Or yesterday.
Somebody has a house. Something is wrong with it. Tom Silva probably knows how to fix it. You’re caught up.
That’s exactly the kind of enormous, evergreen library that makes sense on free streaming. Roku apparently figured that out early enough to spend nearly $100 million on the whole damn operation.
It has also expanded the idea. Dime Cómo Hacerlo, a Spanish-language Roku Original version of Ask This Old House, premiered in 2024 and now has three seasons streaming free on The Roku Channel.
So the franchise hasn’t merely survived the jump from old-school PBS television into streaming. It has spread out.
Forty-Seven Years Later, This Old House Is Still Here
There’s something wonderfully strange about looking at This Old House in 2026.
The television industry that existed when the original show premiered in 1979 is almost unrecognizable now.
Networks changed. Cable exploded. Cable collapsed. Streaming arrived. Everybody launched a subscription service.
Then viewers got sick of paying for 900 subscription services and free television came roaring back wearing a FAST TV nametag.
Through all of it, somebody was still standing in a house explaining why the previous owner absolutely should not have done whatever the hell they did to that pipe.
Now Ask This Old House is 25 seasons old, the larger franchise belongs to Roku, new episodes still premiere on PBS, old ones stream all over the place, there’s a Spanish-language spinoff, and you can ask an AI how badly you’ve screwed up your home improvement project.
That’s not bad for a television franchise that started when Jimmy Carter was president.
And if you still can’t fix the damn thing? Call Tom Silva.
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