Kleenex-sponsored cry-athon Extreme Makeover: Home Edition where living football Ty Pennington and a bunch of well-wishers would redo a home for an impossibly virtuous but down on their luck family each week is cancelled.

In 2009, the Cerdas, a Las Vegas family whose two daughters suffered from immune deficiency disorders, appeared on the reality show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Their old, moldy house was torn down, and new one, designed to protect the young girls, was built in its place. But as it turns out, the Cerda girls may not have been sick at all.

Watching Ty Pennington smash old walls and slap coats of lacquer on new home bowling lanes for struggling families was heartwarming. And the family who got to live in a castle… a real fairytale ending! Then the economy crashed.

There are so many gaudily fraudulent characters in the story of this country's mania for buying and selling homes — like Sam Leccima, the former Flip This House star who allegedly slapped "Sold" signs on unsold houses and didn't even have a real-estate license. A&E yanked his shows from the channel's lineup after charges that his house-flipping efforts were a hoax.

Irksome and manipulative ABC show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition has (maybe) been hoodwinked! It seems the Marrero family, for whom the show built a house last summer, has put the property on the market for a cool $499,999. It's probably not for tax reasons! Maybe it's because a too-big, too-expensive house was built for a family that doesn't need it. The Marreros are a family of six and certainly could have used more space than they had before the trucks rolled up, full of Sears products, but few people need the excess of the Extreme Makeover houses more than they need, well, money. The show, hosted by the manic and unhinged Ty Pennington, has long been criticized for being a tacky, exploitative infomercial for brand tie-ins and corporate sponsorships. So it's kind of nice to see someone say: "You're gonna use me? Well I'll use you right back!"