Chip and Joanna Gaines on Taking a Risk With New Family Content on Max and Their Next ‘Fixer Upper’ Special Edition
Chip and Joanna Gaines have been fixing up their content offering this fall with a focus on family-friendly content. Not that the Gaineses were ever producing programs not acceptable for kids (unless we’re counting some questionably dangerous choices made by Chip on “Fixer Upper” construction sites), but that these new unscripted titles are specifically made to entertain across ages: a roller derby competition, a show comparing the skills of a human and a hamster, and a talent contest for late-in-life performers.
“With streaming on Max, we saw this opportunity where we could create content that felt a little bigger and a little different than the shows that we’ve built thus far with our Magnolia Network, but that would create a space for families to be able to watch together,” Chip Gaines said. “Knowing that we’ve got five kiddos, and just the way that people operate these days with their devices — everyone’s always doing something in their own space, in their own time. And we just thought, hey, what if we made content that brought people together?”
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Across “Roller Jam,” which concluded its first season Nov. 14, “Human vs. Hamster,” which debuted Nov. 21, “Second Chance Stage,” releasing Thursday, and “Back to the Frontier,” premiering next year, the Gaineses say they have only two real through lines for the four new shows: “emotional” content that’s family friendly.
“The range of emotions that you’ll experience watching all four — ‘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 these things that are really special when you can feel those emotions together with the people you love 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 own Magnolia Network. And that means it’s still very much up in the air as to whether there will be more episodes of the shows in the future, until the Gaineses find out if this is what their audience wants as much as they want more “Fixer.”
“We really want these four shows to stand on their own two feet. If they make it, and the Max universe adapts to it and appreciates it and wants more of it, then we want to make more of it,” he said. “We’re anxiously awaiting the results of the shows and the ratings and how people engage with them and how 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 lots of things. We take bold chances and and make really risky moves. In fairness, it’s an option for us to just say, OK, hey, we’re gonna actually stick with this genre that we already feel obviously very comfortable with, which is the lifestyle space. Maybe that’s where we really are supposed to stay and collectively continue to operate out of. But Jo and I think there’s something new around the corner. We’re experimenting with what exactly that might be.”
But while they’re looking at fresh ideas for future projects, they’re also going back to the well on their staples: The Gaineses are currently workshopping ideas for their 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, and then redoing a hotel they now operate.
“We’re wrestling with some ideas,” Joanna Gaines said. “Today is a fun day, because we have a brainstorming meeting. Renovation is something that we’re always doing, whether the cameras are on or off, and so it’s more about, which is going to be a great story to tell? It’s a timely question. We don’t know which one yet, but we’re definitely dreaming about what’s next.”
Before whatever the next “Fixer Upper” is airs, the Gaineses will get to debut the fourth and final show in their initial slate of Max family content: “Back to the Frontier.” And this one actually hits pretty close to home for the Gaineses, in the sense that these contestants — while attempting to live historically accurate lives for the American frontier era — are building their own houses, albeit with way fewer resources than Chip and Jo usually have at their disposal.
“The families were so adorable, because we were two-thirds through the entire process. And as we stepped into their universe, these families were like, ‘Come in here, look at my kitchen! Look at my room!’ And we’re talking about shacks. These are just barns, of sorts,” Chip Gaines said. “But these kids and these families, because they had been there now for weeks and weeks and weeks, didn’t really view it like that. They remembered all the hard work that they had to do to get that wall to stand up straight, or to get the roof, or was it leaking, or to keep the winter, the cool air, outside and they were experimenting with all these versions of insulation. I was so proud and so overwhelmed. To Jo’s point, you get a little emotional because they’re showing you something almost like a kid might. It’s very remedial and simple, but how proud they are of it was like, we invented a rocket that could get us to Mars and back.”
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