Though it’s been several years since home improvement megastars Chip and Joanna Gaines left HGTV to build their lifestyle empire, the couple is ready to return to the network where “Fixer Upper” — and their meteoric rise to fame — began.
When HGTV debuted the first season of “Fixer Upper” in April 2014 — a series that chronicles Chip and Joanna’s adventures renovating old homes in Waco, Texas — no one could imagine how popular the series and its stars would become. The show turned the couple into media moguls; they now oversee over a dozen businesses, per Variety, a successful magazine, a product line at Target, and their own cable channel, Magnolia Network.
To celebrate their whirlwind decade, Chip and Joanna announced on March 5, 2024, that they’ll star in a new spin-off series — “Fixer Upper: The Lakehouse” — airing on both Magnolia and HGTV this summer, according to Variety. Though HGTV still airs re-runs of the first five seasons of “Fixer Upper,” this will mark the first time Chip and Joanna have appeared in new shows on the network since the fifth season of “Fixer Upper” aired in 2018.
Here’s what you need to know:
First Teaser for ‘Fixer Upper: The Lakehouse’ Released
New seasons of “Fixer Upper” have aired on Magnolia Network since 2021, as well as two spin-off series — “Fixer Upper: The Castle” in 2022 and “Fixer Upper: The Hotel” in 2023. Their newest spinoff is set to premiere on June 2, according to the official trailer for the show.
In “Fixer Upper: The Lakehouse,” Chip and Joanna will flip a large mid-century, modern lakehouse overseeing Lake Waco. A press release about the spin-off says that “from demo to design, viewers will follow the full transformation of the property throughout the season as Chip and Joanna go above and beyond with surprising interior designs and unique outdoor installations never before seen on ‘Fixer Upper.’”
The couple’s production company, Blind Nil, is producing the six-episode series, which Magnolia and HGTV will air across three weeks, with back-to-back premieres one night per week. The episodes will also be available for same-day streaming on Max and Discovery+.
“When ‘Fixer Upper’ premiered 10 years ago, we couldn’t have imagined the journey we had ahead of us,” Chip and Joanna said in a statement. “Though a lot has changed and evolved in the decade between then and now, our love for home is still at the heart of everything we do.”
Magnolia Network president Allison Page added, ““We’re so excited to see how Chip and Jo will tackle this lakehouse in Waco and flex their renovation and design muscles in ways our viewers have never seen before. Since the premiere of ‘Fixer Upper’ in 2014, they have amassed a huge global fanbase and grown a beloved lifestyle brand from the ground up, and we’re thrilled to celebrate this milestone alongside them this year.”
Chip and Joanna Gaines Never Planned to Return to ‘Fixer Upper’ After Leaving HGTV
Getty‘Fixer Upper’ stars Chip and Joanna Gaines in 2017
After leaving HGTV and “Fixer Upper” behind in 2018, Chip and Joanna thought they were done with the show for good.
“I think towards the end we just lost steam, we lost the purpose in it,” Joanna told Oprah Winfrey at the time, according to CheatSheet. “We wanted to wake up every day and say, ‘This is why we’re doing this,’ and I think towards the end, it almost felt like it was wagging our tail, and it was controlling us.”
But after a couple of years, and as they agreed to transform the DIY Network into their own network of Magnolia-branded programming, the couple had a change of heart.
“The day we wrapped our final episode of ’Fixer Upper,’ we really believed it was a chapter closed,” Chip wrote on their blog in 2020. “A bittersweet ending to a season of our lives that we couldn’t have been more grateful for. In that moment, the future was a little uncertain, but Jo and I were sure of a few things. We knew we needed a break and a moment to catch our breath.”
“But we also knew we weren’t done dreaming about ways to make old things new again,” he added, announcing that while they developed the programming for Magnolia, they realized how much they missed filming “Fixer Upper.”
A new version of the show, “Fixer Upper: Welcome Home,” debuted when Magnolia launched digitally in 2021, per Variety. The cable network’s official launch was delayed until January 2022 due to the COVID pandemic and the merger of Warner Bros. with Discovery. When “Fixer Upper: Welcome Home” finally premiered there as part of the cable launch, it drew high ratings for the new network, according to a press release that May.
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