Chip and Joanna Gaines’s Cable Network Will Launch in the Summer of 2020
Chip and Joanna Gaines are heading back to television in a really big way. The superstar home-improvement couple—who won over fans as the hosts of HGTV’s Fixer Upper—released new details about their latest project on Wednesday. Their lifestyle company, Magnolia, has teamed up with Discovery to launch an entire cable network, coming in the summer of 2020. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the not-yet-named network will replace Discovery’s DIY Network, which is currently in more than 52 million homes nationwide.
“Chip and Joanna Gaines have become trusted, household names since the debut of Fixer Upper,” Discovery CEO David Zaslav said in a statement. “They’ve got authenticity and reliability, that special something that is so difficult in our business to find. People love them, their taste, their businesses.” The channel will feature long-form programming that touches upon everything from community to home, garden, food, wellness, entrepreneurialism, and design. At present, the multiplatform media company will include a linear TV network and TV Everywhere app, though eventually the pair have plans to add a subscription streaming service.
“The difference moving forward is Jo and I are going to be able to tell more of our life stories,” Chip told USA Today. “And so, as opposed to it being a very narrow vein in our universe, which is obviously construction and design and the things we do for a living, for us we feel like there’s a more holistic story to be told here, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.”
The Gaineses will act as chief creative officers and have a minority stake in the channel. The pair, who welcomed their fifth child, Crew, in June 2018, had made it big with four seasons of Fixer Upper when they decided to call it quits in the fall of 2017. They continued to work on building their lifestyle empire after shuttering the show, however, launching a restaurant, a market and bakery, a coffee shop, furniture, paints, books, and even a print magazine. “We loved this idea of connecting with people in a different way,” Joanna told USA Today of launching the channel. “Telling other people’s stories, curating content. It felt to us a lot like what we love with the magazine, but on a different playing field.”
Most recently, Joanna was spotted hanging out with Jennifer Lopez, ostensibly to help her renovate her new Malibu home. It has yet to be revealed whether or how the renovation will be featured on the Gaines’s new Discovery network.
