WASHINGTON – Our world is dangerously inflamed and imperiled – literally, politically and always metaphorically – yet nothing remains as fascinating as another person’s travails, the next-door drama that’s threaded in with the mundane.

Bedtime and screen time, for example. Have you seen how other people raise their kids? Have you seen how they keep house? Did you hear what the husband said to the wife? Did you see their toddler throw a tantrum in the pizza place?

And how much weight do you think your middle school science teacher has put on in the past few years? What do you think he’s up to now? Three hundred pounds – 350, maybe? He should take his shirt off and stand on a giant digital scale for all to see. How much do you think he’s lost so far? Forty pounds, easy. But how much has he lost this week?

And don’t you feel terrible for the family down the street? The single mom, with the daughter who has that rare illness? No insurance. They might lose their house. Doesn’t it just break your heart? The old Formica counters in their kitchen, I mean?

These were the stories that preoccupied an earlier era of reality TV in the mid- to late-2000s, when millions of people tuned into prime-time network shows that, in their overblown way, were about everyday Americans in everyday houses with everyday problems.

The feelings they stirred never went away. Those shows felt real in a way that pop-singer competitions, petulant Real Housewives, conniving Survivors and certainly Donald Trump and his servile apprentices could never achieve, by focusing on the anxieties of the working middle class, the utterly average and totally overwhelmed.

Is it any wonder that we’re still desperately curious about one another, in these dis-United States? Is that why so many of those vicariously domestic reality shows have come back in recent weeks? This time they’re airing on the wasteland of cable TV, which has become its own kind of flyover territory.

“The Biggest Loser,” which premiered on NBC in 2004 and lasted 18 seasons – through thousands of tearfully and painfully shed excess pounds – returned in January to USA. “Wife Swap,” a deliberately confrontational study in class differences and household gender roles, premiered on ABC in 2004 and lasted an astonishing 124 episodes (and blessed us with some of the internet’s earliest memes). Paramount Network revived the show last spring, and it’s back now for a second season.

The British import “Supernanny” premiered in 2005 on ABC and lasted seven seasons, a fascinating (if earsplitting) act of crisis intervention in the American suburbs, where parents had lost control of their spoiled toddlers and entitled tweens. It returned in January on Lifetime, still willing to enter the screaming fray with stern disciplinary techniques.

More intensely, there is “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” a longtime Sunday staple on ABC. It featured an army of volunteers, led by a carpenter host and his team of designers, who would completely demolish and rebuild the home of a suitably needy or deserving family – a tearful exchange of conspicuous do-gooderism long before the GoFundMe era. It returned two weeks ago, this time on HGTV.

Each of those shows signed off in what felt like a purge of common-man narratives from the reality genre, as networks doubled down on celebrity status and lost interest in the idea that anybody is everybody. Reality TV stopped going into people’s cluttered and chaotic living situations to document their joys and heartaches and to remedy some of their tangible suffering.

Retooled and revived for cable, these shows feel like old friends who’ve acquired a quieter, easier outlook on life. They are still propelled by a vital thread of inquiry: Who are we in our homes, at our tables, with our families and our worries? Who cries out for help? And who answers?

The new “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” (Sundays on HGTV), now hosted by “Modern Family” actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson, is a surprise antidote to HGTV’s relentless promotion of the upgraded lifestyle. It reminds the channel’s viewers that not everyone is in the market for a teardown lake house that they can replace with a luxe vacation home.

As ever, “Extreme Makeover” instead aids the have-nots, as curious about the narrative of need as Charles Dickens was. Here, volunteers and business sponsors step in where the state will not. In the premiere, the show travels to Kern County, Calif., where social worker Jessica Mosley is a single mom with five children – three of whom she adopted when she learned that the court had deemed them non-adoptable. “It was something that weighed heavy on my heart,” she says, so she took in the three siblings herself.

From there, it’s a brief litany of disaster: Mosley’s father died and she lost the home he’d paid for, through some complicated matter with his Veterans Affairs loan. So Mosley and her kids moved into the three-bedroom, one-bathroom, mid-century ranch home owned by her mother.

It isn’t long before Ferguson, accompanied by three professional designers and a horde of local volunteers, is barking commands at two burly bulldozer drivers (whom he humorously christened “Carol” and “Patricia”) to tear the house down to its foundation.

Just as before, I am more transfixed by the brief glimpse “Extreme Makeover” gives us of the house in its “before” state and the family’s tour of their cramped conditions – three teenage sisters sharing one small closet; an adolescent boy who still has to share a room with his big sister; and a kitchen barely large enough for everyone to gather. Dare one desire to linger here longer, and sense the love and coziness in these surroundings, which they show as drab and down-market? I wish the show took another few minutes to honor the nobility in having just enough, before it showers its recipients with much too much.

“Extreme Makeover” still blows in with a clamorous sense of purpose and promotional gifts: a local builder donates the entire house; the brand of the paint is mentioned, as is the instantly recognizable name of the appliance store that provides the high-tech refrigerator. No one ever says a word about what this largesse might do to the family’s tax bracket or the neighborhood’s property values, but no one ever did in the old show, either.

After the show’s climactic shouts of “MOVE! THAT! BUS!,” Mosley and her mother and children weep with joy at the two-story, 3,200-square-foot, Spanish-style, five-bedroom (and 4½-bathroom) mini-manse that replaces their old house, while the viewer basks in all that communal goodwill. It’s like participating in a barn-raising without ever getting up. There’s a neighborliness to it that’s often absent from reality TV, and a true heart beneath the show’s style of promoting its own saintliness.

And it’s all come back just as the economic signals are as mixed as they were in the show’s original heyday. Are we living in ceaseless boom times or on the verge of a precarious tumble? Will it take our houses with it? Where else to assuage our fears about all this than on HGTV, which forever shelters the domestic dream from any reality that’s too real?

The ever manipulative “Wife Swap” (Thursdays on Paramount Network), which burned furiously and fascinatingly in the 2000s, has softened a bit, but it’s still the perfect show for the viewer who never believed the reliable adage that the only people who really know what’s going on in a marriage are the two people in it. “Wife Swap” acknowledges and even honors that chronic, Gladys Kravitz-like nosiness in viewers to get inside other people’s relationships, a mission that’s accomplished here by asking one wife to trade places with another for several days.

Since it’s 2020, things have evolved. “Wife Swap” happily subverts old gender norms, sending spouses from same-sex marriages and also stay-at-home dads into the process, and not just as novelty acts. “Wife Swap’s” remaining outliers are the demonstrably extreme – the family, for example, that home-schools their children and believes there is no way to prove the Earth is round.

The show originally depended on excessive and often unseemly conflict, as the new mom/wife observed how the other family lives and then enacted some temporary rules of her own. The couples compare notes at the end and bicker about the faults they’ve found in each other’s ways of life.

The format, along with the voyeuristic pleasures, are still intact: You get to peer deeply into other people’s kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms, while peering just as deeply into their dysfunctions. You get to see lazy children (and even lazier husbands) squeal with horror at being ordered by the substitute matriarch to clean up after themselves.

The show reintroduced itself last year by swapping a strict, health-conscious wife and mother named Virginia with a less strict, stay-at-home father and husband named Bo. Off they went to different parts of Atlanta, where the show is produced and filmed (the megalopolis seen here is less about Georgia being on the mind than it is about an exurban dream-construct, a Georgia of the mind). She goes to Bo’s middle-class neighborhood, he goes to her McMansionville.

Virginia recoils at Bo’s kitchen pantry, stocked with harmful fats and salty treats, and denies his children their daily chicken nuggets. Bo, meanwhile, pities the husband and children living under Virginia’s regimen, and lets them play video games and eat chips. It’s perhaps too easy to know whom to root for, right up to the very end, when we learn that Virginia and her husband have since separated.

While reveling in the salient class cues, a viewer may notice some slight progress in how the subjects communicate. It’s not all fighting – there seems to be a concentrated effort from the producers to emphasize the participants’ similarities as much as their differences.

In a nation obsessed with divisions, “Wife Swap” more often ends on a note of agreement and reconciliation. It’s a subtle but noteworthy shift that underscores the value of such shows: The more we get a look at how other people live – even in the hyper-produced, stage-managed arena of “unscripted” television – the more we might understand one another.

The revived version of “Supernanny” (Fridays on Lifetime) seems at first unchanged, but it, too, has sanded off some of its more judgmental edge. Child care expert Jo Frost is still firmly in charge, but she long ago chucked the corny, Mary Poppins accoutrements (the black London cab car; the intimidating uniform). She’s now almost 50, wiser and less intimidating. She counsels the millennial generation of parents, whose toddlers are as wildly intractable as those who came before.

“Supernanny” still goes more deeply into the American household than any other reality show – a remarkable feat of openness in a social media age where mommies and daddies post self-edited, positive spins on their lives, all smiles and no misery. Frost’s methods are the same (consistent rules, effective consequences; sit in your chair properly and finish your dinner), but the stakes don’t seem as dire. The message is that no home has to be perfect, because what home ever is?

We’re no longer tuning in to project scorn on one another’s decisions and lifestyles, but also to relate. It’s an especially gratifying watch, I’d imagine, for people who survived the worst of the tantrum years, yet remain sentimental about the experience.

Speaking of some heaped scorn, “The Biggest Loser” (Tuesdays on USA) returned in January to the same criticisms that hounded it years ago: health concerns, lasting physical effects (many of the show’s big losers regained their weight) and mixed signals about body shaming. Little has changed in nearly two decades, except perhaps the boilerplate text at the end of the show that puts more emphasis on the controlled medical supervision of the show’s 12 contestants.

This “Biggest Loser” claims to emphasize lifestyle changes over the numbers on the scale, even if that scale is still an enormous digital display of week-to-week losses revealed during a tense weigh-in, which still leads to contestant eliminations.

Yet here, too, the intensity has been dialed down a tad in exchange for slightly longer segments spent exercising empathy, through longer group discussions and emotional breakthroughs. No one talks anymore about a cash jackpot at the end of the slim-fit rainbow, nor do the participants dwell on grand notions about magically changing their circumstances.

Perhaps, at long last, “The Biggest Loser” has finally admitted to itself that America will always have a weight problem. The intimacy the show offers adheres entirely to format, but it works for those of us who never stop wondering how the rest of the world copes.