Chip and Joanna Gaines are fixing up a new network with slate of Max shows

Chip and Joanna Gaines are packing their tools and taking their business to Max. But although this is an HBO-adjacent platform, don’t expect a gritty or scripted satire of the Fixer Upper couple’s whole HGTV project; you can watch Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s The Curse over on Showtime for that.

Whether Fielder’s upcoming skewering of their ilk or a general desire to add an extension onto their Magnolia Network motivated them, Chip and Joanna are making the move to generalized, family-friendly unscripted programming with a new slate of shows coming to Max in early 2024.

The couple currently has four shows in production, and they really run the gamut between so obvious it’s kind of shocking they’ve never been done before and so insane it’s, well, also kind of shocking they’ve never been done before. In that first category, we’ve got Second Chance Stage, a “talent competition that offers contestants who have pushed their dreams aside a second chance at their big break” and Roller Jam, a show in which “the top roller-skating crews in the country compete to see who will be crowned America’s best roller dancing team” (per a press release). So far, so good.

Okay, now it’s time to buckle up. In the second category, we have Back To The Frontier, a show in which “families will leave the 21st century behind to live as 1800s pioneers in this bold social experiment that will test their strength, stamina, and sense of humor.” No idea yet where this will fall on the spectrum of “unscripted Westworld” to “Wild West Stars On Mars” to “that one episode of The Office where Jim and Pam visit Dwight’s beet farm for the first time.” The other show in this category is Human vs Hamster, a “light and irreverent competition show where groups of people go head-to-head with hamsters in scaled games of strength, smarts, and agility to find out, ‘who is the superior species: humans or hamsters?’” Our money is, obviously, on the hamsters.