Chip and Joanna Gaines have been fixing up their content offering this fall with a give attention to family-friendly content. Not that the Gaineses were ever producing programs not acceptable for teenagers (unless we’re counting some questionably dangerous decisions made by Chip on “Fixer Upper” construction sites), but that these recent unscripted titles are specifically made to entertain across ages: a roller derby competition, a show comparing the abilities of a human and a hamster, and a talent contest for late-in-life performers.
“With streaming on Max, we saw this chance where we could create content that felt slightly larger and slightly different than the shows that we’ve built up to now with our Magnolia Network, but that might create an area for families to have the option to observe together,” Chip Gaines said. “Knowing that we’ve got five kiddos, and just the way in which that folks operate nowadays with their devices — everyone’s at all times doing something in their very own space, in their very own time. And we just thought, hey, what if we made content that brought people together?”
Across “Roller Jam,” which concluded its first season Nov. 14, “Human vs. Hamster,” which debuted Nov. 21, “Second Probability Stage,” releasing Thursday, and “Back to the Frontier,” premiering next yr, the Gaineses say they’ve only two real through lines for the 4 recent shows: “emotional” content that’s family friendly.
“The range of emotions that you just’ll experience watching all 4 — ‘Roller Jam,’ you’ll think is exciting — and I also cried at those episodes,” Joanna Gaines said. “It’s tapping back into that human emotion, and feeling this stuff which are really special when you’ll be able to feel those emotions along with the people you like essentially the most.”
Chip Gaines described the shows as “very different” than what viewers have come to expect from the “Fixer Upper” couple and what they’ve created previously for HGTV and now for their very own Magnolia Network. And which means it’s still very much up within the air as as to if there will probably be more episodes of the shows in the long run, until the Gaineses discover if that is what their audience wants as much as they need more “Fixer.”
“We really need these 4 shows to face on their very own two feet. In the event that they make it, and the Max universe adapts to it and appreciates it and needs more of it, then we have the desire to make more of it,” he said. “We’re anxiously awaiting the outcomes of the shows and the rankings and the way people engage with them and the way people feel about them. And as that data starts coming back into our ecosystem, then we’ll start making decisions. That’s how we do plenty of things. We take daring probabilities and and make really dangerous moves. In fairness, it’s an option for us to only say, OK, hey, we’re gonna actually persist with this genre that we already feel obviously very comfortable with, which is the approach to life space. Possibly that’s where we actually are alleged to stay and collectively proceed to operate out of. But Jo and I believe there’s something recent across the corner. We’re experimenting with what exactly that may be.”
But while they’re taking a look at fresh ideas for future projects, they’re also going back to the well on their staples: The Gaineses are currently workshopping ideas for his or her next special installment of “Fixer Upper,” which most recently aired a season focused on the renovation of a lakehouse, and before that followed them flipping an actual castle near their hometown of Waco, Texas, after which redoing a hotel they now operate.
“We’re wrestling with some ideas,” Joanna Gaines said. “Today is a fun day, because we have now a brainstorming meeting. Renovation is something that we’re at all times doing, whether the cameras are on or off, and so it’s more about, which goes to be an awesome story to inform? It’s a timely query. We don’t know which one yet, but we’re definitely dreaming about what’s next.”
Before whatever the subsequent “Fixer Upper” is airs, the Gaineses will get to debut the fourth and final show of their initial slate of Max family content: “Back to the Frontier.” And this one actually hits pretty near home for the Gaineses, within the sense that these contestants — while attempting to live historically accurate lives for the American frontier era — are constructing their very own houses, albeit with way fewer resources than Chip and Jo normally have at their disposal.
“The families were so lovely, because we were two-thirds through the whole process. And as we stepped into their universe, these families were like, ‘Are available in here, take a look at my kitchen! Have a look at my room!’ And we’re talking about shacks. These are only barns, of sorts,” Chip Gaines said. “But these kids and these families, because they’d been there now for weeks and weeks and weeks, didn’t really view it like that. They remembered all of the labor that they’d to do to get that wall to get up straight, or to get the roof, or was it leaking, or to maintain the winter, the cool air, outside they usually were experimenting with all these versions of insulation. I used to be so proud and so overwhelmed. To Jo’s point, you get slightly emotional because they’re showing you something almost like a child might. It’s very remedial and easy, but how proud they’re of it was like, we invented a rocket that might get us to Mars and back.”
