The Press Box - ‘The Press Box’ — A Time of Transition (Ep. 356)

Episode Date: September 29, 2017

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker analyze President Donald Trump's effect on apolitical NFL broadcasters (02:30), Megyn Kelly's transition to morning television (18:15), and the end of 'Fixer Upper' (28:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I wanted to tell you about Black on the Air. Hosted by the one and only, the great one. Larry Wilmore, even though he's a Lakers fan, I still like him. I think he's talented. But he has all kinds of guests on, from Neil deGrasse Tyson to Al Franken to Bernie Sanders.

You name it. They're coming on. Pop culture, politics, newsmakers. And then at the beginning of every podcast, Larry does a little riff about whatever is either sticking in his car or things that he's enjoying. Although he has been enjoying much lately. the way the world's going.

But Larry will riff on anything. And then he has guests on, it's great. If you liked everything else that he's done, comedy-wise, if you love this Comedy Central show, you will love this podcast. It is a medium that he has built for. It's called Black on the Air, hosted by Larry Wilmore.

Get it wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. David, you're here today. And always, really. Because we've known each other since we were 14 years old. Has it been that long? Yeah. And I think we didn't know this, when we met at that age and, you know, spent the majority of our world history class making wrestling jokes,

that we were contractually obligated at some future day to do a podcast together. If we had known what podcasts were in 1992, I think it would have been the only possible endpoint to that relationship. We have been doing a really bad podcast for our whole lives, you might say. We have. We have. Over video games, over professional wrestling pay-per-views, over beers and Brooklyn. Relationships. Yeah, exactly. It's been an ongoing podcast with 35 listeners for, most of the time we've known each other. Often just two. Yeah.

This is the press box on the ringer podcast network. There are plenty of podcasts on the ringer network, but this one is the most sporadic. This is the press box on Brian Curtis. Editor-A-Large of the Ringer co-hosting today, Ringer art director, Masked Man Show host, and as he put it in my senior yearbook, my tag team partner in the squared circle of life. Wow. David Shoemaker.

Three things we want to talk about today. Topic one. How Donald Trump turned otherwise apolitical sports announcers into political polemicists, aka how Terry Bradshaw got woke. Topic number two is Megan Kelly's new talk show and her Stephen Colbert problem. And finally, topic three, the end of the reality show that's close to our hearts, geographically speaking, Chip and Joanna's Fixer Upper on HGTV. I'm excited, man.

Let's get into it. All right. Let's start with Donald Trump because what conversation, what podcast across America does not start with Donald Trump? It is so easy to talk about this administration. and say, I couldn't have imagined X two years ago. David, God damn it, I could not have imagined. Terry Bradshaw, Chris Collinsworth, Rich Eisen, and Rex Ryan,

directly addressing the president of the United States on NFL pregame shows. What did you make of that on Sunday? It was a lot to take in. I'll say that, right? I mean, we were all, I think, on some level prepared for the amount of on-field protest that we were going to see on Sunday. as you alluded to. It was a little bit shocking to see.

It was shocking to hear a lot of these guys, you know, come out with varying degrees of defiance in their voice and, you know, verbally protest the president. There did feel like there was a little bit of formality to some of them, I guess I'll say. Like this was a necessary, you know, eat your vegetables, get this out of the way before we can proceed with the regularly scheduled program.

We have to say this. And then we can get on with a fun. Yeah. And a little bit formal. I know on ESPN, they do this occasionally. I'm not sure if they do this on the pregame shows, but when they have a politically tricky segment, they tape it in advance because you want to make sure that you get those words out okay.

Sure. You don't step in it. Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if some of that happened here where it's like, let's do a take. Let's let you go in on Trump, Mr. Bradshaw and see how this sounds. And then we'll come back and do it for, you know, and then that will air and we'll just have that as our segment. I'm sure it was practice. I mean, Howie Long followed up, what Bradshaw said, I think, immediately on the show, with basically a verbatim,

I mean, recitation of what he said on a separate show, too. I mean, this is, this is, it's tricky, it's tricky material. I don't fault him for that, but this is a, you know, this, and not to, you know, rag on, on Howie Long, who seems to be kind of, who seemed emotionally, at least to be the most, one of the most sincere people that talked about it, but it, you know, it was, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a bit in a lot of ways. It was rehearsed. So these guys, these shows are, it's safe to say, pretty apolitical the NFL pregame show. And one of the fine things about Trump to me is just him pushing people who do not want to talk about politics, who do not want to be political actors into that field, right?

Jamel Hill is happy to talk about politics. Sure. Maybe she did not expect to be doing it quite on this scale, but she's happy to do it. Chris Collinsworth does not want to talk about. Chris Collinsworth on week one did not want to talk about the Zeke Elliott thing, which was very germane to the football game being played on the field. Yeah. Much less talk about president, but here he is in his own way, demanding an apology from the president on NBC. What did you think of that?

This was the one where the necessity or the feeling that it was necessary to say something really felt the most obvious. Because the framing that he came forward with was, it felt like he was striking the right tone, but the content of his statement was just, completely in the wrong direction. Yeah, he said, he thought if the players just went to the White House and Trump listened to them and listened to the things they cared about, aka police violence, white supremacy, those kinds of things. Right. That they would come to some common ground. Right.

Which I just don't believe is the case at all. I don't think that that's, I don't think that's, I don't think the problem is that Trump is not listening to the players. No, I mean, obviously not. And it actually evokes the sort of like internet trolls. persona who insists that like the worst thing about Colin Kaepernick's original protest was that he didn't even know what he was making what he was kneeling for right? It's just like you think you're starting a conversation. Well, why don't it, but like you don't even, you know, we don't even know what the point is. Well, it's not hard to figure out what the point is. I mean, half of these people that

we're talking about today knew exactly what the point was. But to say that like people needed to go explain the problem to Donald Trump. It's like, no, I mean, the problem should be, should be there for him to understand pretty straightforwardly. And this is. And this is a little, is the unique problem of Trump for a lot of media people. We can't just come together. We can't just be unified. We can't just talk to each other, right? The problem is people are talking and they're saying really offensive stuff. So that's actually not it. I thought Bradshaw's was pretty good. Yeah, Bradshaw's was great. And again, I'm not, I'm going to, I'm, we're grading these guys by impossible standards, right? They're not, they don't want to be doing this. But they're, but they're doing

their best. Right. Bradshaw's was kind of amazing where he said, I'm not sure the president understands free speech rights and told him he should concentrate on North Korean health care. Just kind of a shot there at the end. I think that's something that we can all agree on. Even Trump supporters, you know, we'll say that they would prefer he not be tweeting with the sorts of things and the degree to which he is. But you talk about them, you know, judging them by an unrealistic standard. I mean, it's sort of the standard is the Shannon Sharp standard at this point, right?

That was amazing. I'm disappointed. And I'm, and I'm, and I'm, and I'm, and I'm, I'm disappointed, Skip, and joy, because this is the tipping point. Of the 7,537 things that President Trump has said in the last 50 years, him calling an NFL player, an SOB, is what brought the NFL, the owners, and its players together. and while some might be moved by the conscience of these NFL's owners, it wasn't their conscience that moved them. It was the cash.

Now, that was on Monday. Right. So the smoke had cleared a little bit, and we'd kind of seen what had happened. These people are talking about something that hadn't happened yet on Sunday, the protests anyway. And then all of a sudden you have these protests. You have Daniel Snyder and Jerry later that night, Jerry Jones locked arms with the players. And winked at the camera. Yeah, and Shannon Sharp, you know, who is, I think, in a lot of people's mind, he is the other guy with Skip Baylis.

Right. He is a big, that's not fair. He's a big TV star and all stuff on his own. But he comes in and says, no, no, no, this, let me tell you why the owners were standing down there. They were worried that their product was threatened. Yeah. They were worried that the president was going to do something that was going to take money away from them. Yeah.

And yeah, that was really clarifying. And that was great. And it was like eight minutes long. Oh, sure. Yeah, no. I mean, Skip just got out of the way and let him go. And it was one, I mean, it was a really, I mean, just impressive, brilliant speech. I mean, that every time I thought he was going to lose the train, he'd just like, he'd just jump back in.

He had this great list where he said, here are all the things that didn't shock NFL owners. But that night in Alba, last Thursday night in Alabama, or excuse me, Friday night in Alabama, was what really put them over the top. Right. It was, it was, it was Colin Kaepernick. It was not what he said about Mexican immigrants. He was not what he said about Muslims and Gold Star families, et cetera. etc. That was the moment. Right.

And yeah, and that really nicely pointed out this whole, you know, really clarified it because it's like this is what got those guys onto the field. Yeah. I mean, and part of his, you know, underlying message was that the movement that Colin Kaepernick started had been co-opted now by the fact that the owners are down there kneeling too. And I think that, you know, I don't want to use the term, you know, as too much of a wedge. But that's, I think, what we're saying with a lot of the, you know, middle-aged white sportscasters that were in the position of making these political statements this week is that, you know, when the movement envelops them, when it's necessary for those people to comment, then I think, you know, you've got to wonder whether or not the purpose of the movement has just been lost to history at this point.

Right. And they're going to come in, they're going to come in, most of them in defense of free speech. Sure. Which is important. It's not exactly what Colin Kaepernick was talking about. But it is certainly a related story in this. They are, I think it's fair to say, all of them are going to come in defense of the NFL. Because what is network television when it shows games other than the stewards of the NFL? That's what those guys are in business with the NFL. I mean, it would have been different if Roger Goodell had come out and said like, yes, sir, Mr. President, I totally agree.

And then they would have been in the position of presumably going, you know, nose to nose with the NFL. but that didn't happen, obviously. I mean, I think the most interesting thing about the story, I mean, about the fallout to Trump's comments was how much in lockstep every, every, you know, wealthy old man in the NFL was in reaction to it. And I think Shannon Sharp was exactly right, you know. I mean, it's not an issue of free speech or of, you know,

any sort of civil rights. It's a matter of the bottom line. Yeah. And getting back to what we were, what Colin Kaepernick was trying to say all these many months ago. Speaking of Middle Age white guys, Dale Hanson, a sportscaster in

Dallas, Texas, Dallas, Fort Worth that we grew up with. Our ancestral home. People don't know, he's 69 years old. He's this survivor of the anchorman era of local news. This towering figure in Dallas. I mean, just a guy who were growing up was not only big on television, but

stories about him were big, a salary, what he was doing, you know, his place there. He comes out with this commentary, he calls them unplugged, on Monday night right before the Cowboys play. Right. And 630, I believe in Dallas. My mom actually tipped me off to this. My mom, thankfully, is helping shape my media diet.

And it was unbelievable. And it was two nutrient-rich minutes about the anthem and about the protests and about Trump that aired on the local news in Dallas. I mean, just that is remarkable. This isn't Dale Hanson's first mic drop moment. He's made several appearances in our various Twitter feeds over the past year or so. But he's, I mean, this is, this is, I mean, and he's never incoherent. I mean, he's always, he's very, very good at this.

This was my favorite of these Dale Hansen moments, though. He was, it was, it felt like, you know, just just the perfect, he was the perfect voice, weirdly for that, for, you know, the statement that he was making. Yeah. And you just sort of wanted something very old fashioned about it. I'm just going to look at the camera and just talk about this. I've got something to say. But you realize like, oh, so few people even on cable really have the talent to pull that off.

You know, like, you know, you can remember some Keith Olberman, you know, kind of special comments and stuff like that. But do a tight two-minute version of that. They can run again on your local newscast, I must emphasize, but also, you know, kick ass in its way. It was very pastorly. I mean, and that I think speaks to the market. Or maybe it's more akin to a Sunday school teacher. But the fact that he was speaking unopposed, it wasn't part of a conversation. It was a monologue.

It really evoked, you know, a certain, as the son of a pastor, you know, a certain sort of big city southern pastor where you can say things that might not be your congregation's instinct. But if you make the case coherently and you may, and if the underlying argument is, you know, a more full and open heart. You know, you can really, you can really change minds. And I feel like that's a lot of what Dale did. Fascinating thing to me about Dale, who I wrote about when we were at Granland, was that he has joined two aesthetically completely different institutions.

Local news, right, which is about a lost cat in a tree. And Twitter, which is the snarkiest, you know, universe imaginable. And he has found the bridge between these two things. Sure. Like that, I tweeted that at the answer, my mom tip me off to it. almost like 900 retweets just of the Dale thing. And then other people did the same thing. It was on Deadspan.

It was one of the most popular stories on Deadspan. Like he has figured out how to get between these two worlds. That's amazing. Who else has done that? Well, it's amazing. But like I said, this is not the first one of these. It's been passed around the internet. But the headline is still Dallas anchor.

It's not Dale Hanson yet. He's 69 years old. He's a legend. Don't we know who Dale Hanson is? Don't we as this country now know who he is? I should hope so. He deserves it. He deserves a bigger platform than the one he's been given.

He was on Ellen after the Michael Sam thing. I think it's finally time to put him into the into the two-name pantheon. We know who Dale Hanson is, everyone. We don't do a little segment here. We call the overworked Twitter joke of the week, David. Oh, yes. I come not to shame people. I come to make a point that about Twitter that there are these moments where there is an obvious joke right there.

It's just right there. Everybody's going to make it. You're sitting on Twitter and you're like, do I make the obvious joke because I can maybe make it first? or to prove that I'm thinking that, or do I just let it go by because I know someone else has already made it? Now, this as a writer is something that you and I both struggle with. Pitch a piece.

Is it possible that someone's already pitched this piece, already written this piece? On Twitter, the immediacy of it makes it a, it's a split-second decision. Do you do a quick search? Just make sure this joke is... By the time you search, someone is going to take your joke, though, right? So you've got to just go out with it.

I got a couple runner-ups from this week and then a really a clear winner. This is number, the runner-up overworked Twitter joke of the week. This is after the NCAA scandals began at Louisville. When Rick Bettino initially sent out that statement, this is before he was formally let go. Rick Petino gave a statement about, you know,

saying I had no idea this was going on. This was the work of bad actors. It was an overworked Twitter joke to say, live look at Rick Petino and then tweet a clip of Major Strasser from Casablanca saying, I'm shocked, shocked to find gambling going on. That was a good joke a lot of people made. Another runner-up was after the carnage happened to Louisville to say that Bobby Petrino was now the most stable part of the Louisville Athletic Department. That was kind of a – that was a good one, right?

It's funny because it's true. But number one, Twitter gave a bunch of users the option to go to 280 characters. Oh, yeah. We've talked about nothing on Twitter since then. Yes. But in the immediate moments after that announcement, if you tweeted, here's why Twitter is wrong to expand characterless. Limits, part one of 125.

Boom! That was amazing. Congratulations. You just made the same joke as everyone else. Who says monoculture is dead? We say we splen off, well, we all make the same joke. And again, I don't want to, I don't want to criticise. It was right there. Some of my favorite writers, just all at the same time. If nobody had made that joke, we would have been worse off for it.

But thankfully, someone did. I chuckled. I chuckled. Then I kind of chuckled again when I saw the second and third time. And fourth and fifth and six. All right, David, more from the press box, but first, a quick break. Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I want to tell you about the ringers gambling podcast. It is called Against All Odds with Cousin Sal.

And you're not going to believe this, but it is hosted by Cousin Sal. The biggest degenerate gambler that I know. He's such a degenerate. He has three other degenerates that he calls the degenerate trifecta. And they break down every conceivable gambling thing you would ever want to gamble on. They even take it at Captain Morgan's Make Believe Casino. where Sal makes up props on all kinds of things, sports, pop culture, you name it. You are going to want to get your gambling advice from these guys.

Cousin Sal, he's been a staple on the BS podcast for the last 10 years. So good that we gave him his own podcast. Check it out against all odds with Cousin Sal. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Topic number two, David, is Megan Kelly. On Monday, Megan started her long-awaited. Is that the right word? Long-gestating.

I don't know if anybody was awaiting this. morning show on NBC. You might remember Kelly as the contentious Fox News host who went to toe to toe with Donald Trump. Well, now she's something else. She's Oprah. She's a day she's rosy. What is she?

Oh, man. She Meredith Fiera? I don't know what she is. It's an interesting. I mean, long away, the gestation period is an interesting part of this because from the moment NBC signed her away from Fox News. There were, you know, we experienced this as people who engage in, you know, meta-media criticism as the sort of like, we see like the stages of the cross of various

media profiles, right? There's the, there's the big Megan Kelly profile when she's a free agent. There's the big profile, or the big, you know, Hollywood reporter piece or whatever when she signs. There's various Vanity Fair and, and, you know, big glossy magazine pieces along the way. Now we're finally there, right? I mean, she had her Sunday night show that was sort of, you know, killed preemptively. But now we're at the place where they all dream she would be hosting the 9 o'clock hour of the Today Show. And, well, I mean, it's just started.

But the initial reviews have not been particularly glowing. Yeah. When I said that Stephen Colbert problem earlier, what I was talking about was that it's this weird phenomenon that happens in the media. Somebody's really good at something. And then you hire them and say, I know, I want you to do something totally different. So Stephen Colbert becomes really. famous by doing this buffoonish right-wing character.

And then you say, I want you to be kind of like a general interest talk show host and not really talk about politics all that much except in a kind of nice bipartisan way. Of course, as soon as Stephen Wilbur got rid of that, he went back to being popular. Yeah. Which he was before. Sure. And Megan Kelly, can we enjoy a few moments in the nonpartisaning of Megan Kelly here for this is heard of People magazine? I'm not a political animal and I never have been. The subject was not true to my soul.

Really? On all those all those Fox News segments about the Black Panthers and stuff, you were not interested in politics. It seemed like it was very close to Rissal. Not into that. In an interview with Elle, when she was asked about Jamel Hill, she got up and threatened to leave the interview, such as I'm not a journalism expert was one of her lines from there.

And then on the very first episode of the new Megan Kelly NBC show, she said, we'll be dissecting the latest tweet from Donald Trump. Oh, wait, we're not going to be. doing that. The truth is, I'm kind of done with politics for now. So can you just be done? Can you just stop? Not in 2017. I mean, you can't separate politics from anything right now, right? Especially something like the Today Show where they will interview political candidates, you know? I mean, they will interview, they will touch on, I mean, how can you talk about, how can you, how can you not talk about what's going on the NFL on the Today Show, right? But that she's going to be this,

the idea that she would be at the oasis from that is just sort of mind boggling, right? Yeah, it's both a misread of the media moment where everybody who, everybody who's big right now is getting, is getting big because they're engaging with politics in one way or another. But yeah, but also this idea that she's going to be kind of the like slightly zany morning show host. Yeah. And yeah, exactly. To take your, to your, your Colbert point, I mean, so many people have, have been given this perch on the Today Show, not the same one, but there have been any number of Today Show co-hosts that have, that have, you know, been, been, been, been welcomed with pomp and circumstance and then like, you know, shown the door in pretty

short order. The one thing, I mean, I don't want to get into the backstage politics of, you know, NBC's morning programming. But the one thing that's clear is that it's not for everybody. Even if you're sure that somebody is the right fit, it's, you know, it's not a, it's not a simple equation. And so to bring her in, to bring in Megan Kelly and just assume that she's going to be, that this is the right position for it.

I mean, despite the fact that she's never done anything like this, it's pretty. It's a pretty wild calculation. Absolutely. I think that came home for me when I saw her in a bit riding a tandem bicycle with Al Roker to NBC's headquarters. Yeah. The 30 Rock. Like that didn't know what that was weird, but that just seemed sort of out of character. To take, yeah, to take the most, like the silliest reach of the, you know, the silliest aspects of the Today Show and to throw her in, you know, just kind of throw her in the deep end.

I mean, I guess you do, you have to, you have to, you know, sort of make her feel like she's a part of that, the fabric of that. But it, but it was, it was very, very strange. So one of the interesting things, too, is as she's done a couple of shows now, they've been, I would say mostly panned by America's TV critics. But they've also had these awkward moments where you sort of remember that this person is not working in this milieu. There was one yesterday, which would be Thursday, where she had Robert Redford and Jane Fonda on. And she asked Jane Fonda about having plastic. surgery. But you look amazing. Do you, have you, why did you say, I read that you said you felt you're not proud

to admit that you've had work done? Why not? We really want to talk about that now? Which I guess points for honesty. But, you know, Jane Fonda kind of bristled at it and said, wait, what are you asking me about this? I mean, it's talking about someone who's out of their milieu. I mean, it's, she's coming from a world where you're graded on, I mean, at this point, especially after the last presidential campaign, you're graded on whether or not you double and triple down on questions when you're when the person you're interviewing is is refusing to answer in the way that

you want now she's in a world where you got to know when to just stop asking the question and usually that's like in in this case that would have been midway through asking it the first time but to but to kind of like to to hammer on that point of all things when they're in like a you know presumably like a very brief segment to promote a movie is just sort of insane yeah it's like another way to say what you said is that you're in a world where giving offense is what you get complimented for and here is where you get graded on not offending people. Like being really nice to the movie stars who are sitting across from you.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, as we're talking about this, I mean, at the expense of self-awareness, you know, I guess I've read all of these reviews about Megan Kelly. And, you know, I mean, the question that keeps being begged is like whether it's even worth dissecting this early on. I mean, she's either going to find her footing in the way that Colbert did or at some point, there's going to be a much more interesting flame-out conversation to have, right? Right. But the Washington, I mean, it's been, it's, that was a brutal review.

The Washington. Yeah. And Doreen St. Felix and the, in the New Yorker, I mean, there's just like, review after review has just been sort of crazy. And as I mentioned to you before we went on the air, when I was like Googling to make sure I had read all the reviews on the first, if you just Google Megan Kelly, one of the, two of the first things that come up are a variety piece from June and and a Vanity Fair piece from back in March that are just sort of like dissecting the problem that is to come. And those things are still

sitting there as if they're like, you know, relevant information. Yeah. By the way, that's a really tricky thing. Morning television. Not just we call this the Today show, but really it's kind of a freestanding talk show. And there is this graveyard of talented people who have gone into that space

and just been really, really bad. Megan Malalley, who was one of her guests on the first show. Right. And that. Caroline Ray. I don't know if you remember that after Rosie O'Donnell left. Yeah. Katie Kirk tried that. Jane Pauley, almost everybody who has been on the Today Show has also tried a standalone talk show.

Right. It's really hard. And I don't know, you know, like people like Rosie O'Donnell and General Generous are good at it. I think just because they own the bit. And it feels that, you know, like when Ellen is dancing with her guests, you believe that Ellen wants to be dancing with her guests. She's not being forced to do this by the conventions or. Rosie is back in the day was belting out show tunes. Yeah.

Also, the stakes are lower. You know, I mean, if Ellen's show had cratered in the first season, it wouldn't have been the end of Ellen's career. It would have just been, you know, a daytime show that didn't work. But we're talking about the Today Show, which has this aura about it, right? It's like every time they're talked about Colbert, every time they're replacing guests for the late night shows, it doesn't matter that like 1% of the people who were watching these shows 20 years ago are watching now, right?

I mean, the vanity fair piece that I mentioned earlier talks about how morning news, the morning TV program is a dinosaur, but it's still limping along. And it just feels like the stakes are so high for Megan Kelly getting an hour of the Today Show despite the fact that, you know, do we even care about this genre anymore? I mean, it's a, it's a weird part of the media landscape. And she's making all this money Matt Lauer. She's making, what, $15 million or something, Matt Lauer, $25 million for a show that fewer and fewer people are watching. But, you know, we're talking about it. So I guess that's something. I wanted to do a little thought experiment, David, where I wanted to try to misuse your talents as a journalist.

Okay. That's will be fun. So here are some jobs. Let's agree that you're a really, really talented writer, rank and tour, whatever you want to say. Right. How could we misuse your talents in the best possible way? Just a couple I came up with. One would be immigration policy reporter.

You could be good at that. Okay. You can't do profiles. I just want details of policy. Yeah, just the nuts and bolts. No, I would not be very good at that. The ghost historian on the next volume of the Bill O'Reilly killing series of books. Weirdly because of previous employment, I'm a little bit too close to that to comment.

But yeah, I would be very, very, I would be very bad at that. Yeah. And finally, is the only one. Sports Impressionist Build is the next. Next Frank Kellyando. How would you do with that? I would do really bad. And as evidence, that was me just doing my Troy Eggman impression.

You can't tell it all. Wow, I wonder who caught that. We take the worst house in the best neighborhood and we turn it into our client's dreamo. Are you all ready to see your fixer upper? Topic number three, David. On Tuesday, the Red State Power couple Chip and Joanna Gaines stars the HGTV powerhouse Fixer Upper. Yes. Oh my gosh.

And as they are ending the show after its fifth season, like LeBron James, they only talk on their own through their own media. And this is what they said. Our plan is to take this time to shore up and strengthen the spots that are weak, rest the places that are tired, and give lots of love and attention to both our family and our business. Now, HGTV is kind of this Marvel universe of home repair. Yes. Can you explain to the listeners out there what made Chip and Joanna stand out? I mean, I can speak from my own personal opinion. I mean, I can tell you that the expanded Shoemaker family.

And from my parents, my, you know, extended family, my sister, all of us are completely enthralled. Part of it for us was the Waco, Texas connection. I'm a Baylor University graduate, as I not so often say. And my sister actually works there. So, you know, my mom, like, for her, it's, I think, a little bit of a look-in on our lives in a very, you know, abstract way. But what makes the show work is that as compared to all of the other HGTV shows, which I watch, they're not casting aspersions, but those shows are filled with sort of like automaton's, like, you know, decorators that just seem to be pieced together from like pages, like they just took actual issues of Martha Stewart living and pasted them into a golem. But these are, Chip and Joanna are real humans, you know, they're very, they are relatable. they're sweet and wonderful

but they somehow mastered the art of making it seem like the camera's actually just picking up real life interaction in a way that these shows don't often do to the two of us who grew up in Texas they are stored of the Red Street State dream aren't they? Oh yeah.

They work in the city but they live on the farm. Exactly. They are huge professionals, big time on television but they have plenty of time to devote to their wife and kids. I'm really, I'm amazed, and I just haven't grown up in Texas, I just, there's certain things about their aesthetic that just reach out to me. Oh, yeah.

And I think one of them is when Joanna does a kitchen and she does the one word sign in the kitchen. Remember that from childhood? The one word sign, the chalkboard with love written on it and like the in a cursive font, strangely. Yeah, it's a. I saw one the other day that just said vintage. Yes.

That's kind of the, that's kind of the, that's kind of the, that's kind of the, medical version of, you know, the one, right? It's like, yeah. All these things are for sale at the Magnolia Market Store online. So I watched a couple of episodes just to refresh myself. I've watched, I wouldn't say I've watched Fixer up are mostly on planes when it's kind of a captive audience, you know, have a couple of hours to kill. I've watched it on planes and in living rooms and on my phone while I'm waiting in line,

every which way. Tell me if this is not how a typical episode goes. Usually we begin on the farm and they're feeding one of the animals with their kids. Perhaps a calf named licorice. An actual example. Yeah. Then they're driving in the car and Chip makes a lot of dad jokes. Yes.

Just goes in and Joanna kind of no sells the jokes. Yes. Just not laughing at all. Yeah. Then there's the regular reality show stuff, three houses, pick a house, renovate the house. At some moment, Chip from across the renovated house, like, Joe, check this out.

Yes. And they'll find like a hidden chimney or something like that. Or a glass, a message in a bottle in one episode. Yeah, there's always some treasure to be found. Then at some point, they'll talk about what's really rewarding about the whole process. Yes. It's a little bit of a spiritual aspect. It's rewarding about the process, the jobs, the way they get to spend time with their family and the sacrifices they make.

And then at the end, the kids, just before the reveal, the kids will come over and do something really incidental, like put the fruit in the bowl on the table, maybe arrange the flowers, something like that. And then their cool thing was they had like a photo of the old house that would literally come apart. Yeah. And the new house would be revealed. Yes. And they would, and they'd say, I'd love to show you the kitchen. Yeah. I'd love to show you the master suite.

There's a lot of little things in these home renovation reality shows. And, you know, the reveal of the house by pulling apart the old picture is it was a very minor innovation on an existing trope. But that's, that's what one of the things that makes fixer upper so good is they found just little twists on all of these home. tropes and made them just a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more lived in, you might say, despite the fact that some of the houses look sort of very modern country antiseptic. Absolutely. The one thing you didn't touch on when you were talking about the sort of Texas ideal that this family conveys is the dream of the small business, becoming the big business, sort of, you know?

And, you know, this started off as a, I mean, obviously it was a side project for both of them. I can say that my sister lives in a very early Joanna Gaines decorated home. Really? Not a tear-down renovation, but she did some design work for the previous owner, or that's just the legend of the house. Who knows? I'm sure that's half of Waco right now. But yeah, I mean, it was a small-time operation that grew.

Chip bought out his partners famously like the two weeks before the show started and took a, you know, a construction business and made. into this Magnolia Empire. Who knows why they're shutting down the show after this season. It's taken, I mean, but it does, it shows you how far this show has come in the national consciousness

that like, you know, two, three seasons ago, this was an occasion, this is a conversation, like the only time I ever heard about Fixer Upper was when I was when I was talking to my mom on the phone. You know,

I mean, the most, I mean, there were, you know, there were blogs that followed it, but, I mean,

that touched on Fixer Upper, but most of those blogs were like Christian blogs that said that Joanna Gaines was not being a good housewife for doing all the work that she was doing. You know, this is the level of attention it was getting back then. Now we're in a world where they announced that the show's ending and People Magazine has to put up a post about it. I mean, just like every single, every magazine has touched on the fact that this show is shutting down. And, you know, I'm sure this is not the last that we'll hear of the Gaines family.

When you talk about them becoming an empire, the mom and pop business becoming an empire, is this the moment to mention that Chip just published a book called Capital Gaines? What a pun. Yeah, it is. I mean, listen, there's always going to be puns in this world. And also now in Waco has become this thing to go to. Like my mother-in-law who lives in California, as most modern California woman you can imagine, wants to go to Waco, Texas. Yeah.

To shop in the Magnolia Empire. I drove by there not long ago. And the line was blocks and blocks and blocks long to get into this stuff. Yeah. I mean, this at Waco, Texas is not a not a. small town. I mean, not as small as maybe sometimes as it seems on TV, but the idea that you would ever wait in a line in Waco, Texas is just as insane. I mean, honestly, you don't wait, you don't have to wait into a line to go see a college football game. I mean, there's no,

there's no reason to wait in a line. The way that they have taken over the city, and not just with their enterprises, but also the ancillary stuff, the, the, the fixer-upper house tours. I mean, there are people driving people around the city to show, so they can look in real life at the houses that have been remodeled. You know, I mean, there's all of this, I mean, it is, it has changed Waco. And another one of the weird online things that happened a little bit outside of the radar of the big press was when they are trying to buy the silos, where they have the market now. There was a lot of, like the Waco coverage was about the games going to war with the,

with the city government a lot of the time. That's, you know, a little bit less interesting on a national scale. But, I mean, they have just taken over Waco, Texas. I hope, you know, and I think that the city of Waco hopes that with the ending of the show, they don't, you know, they don't just leave town. I assume it'll keep, I assume they'll keep going. The market there is, like you said, very, very, like quite a tourist destination. Yeah, I used to think that for 60 and 70-year-old moms, Charleston and Savannah was Mecca and Medina. Oh, yes.

And now Waco has been added to that list. It is really the place to go. You want to hang out with these people. You want to see their stuff. There's like a cupcake shop or a bakery that they have that's been. big too? Yes. Yeah, yeah. They bought the famous elite cafe. I haven't really followed up on that story and changed the name, which was really sad. That's a Waco institution for those not familiar. One of the few Waco institutions out there, yeah. There was also a good piece in New York

magazine this week by Caitlin Flanagan. Oh, yeah. Talked about how one funny thing about this when she did a very good job going through all the archetypes, if not stereotypes of all these shows, which is the husband is always swinging a sledgehammer and the wife is always coming into design the house after it's over. But one thing she talked about was that flipping homes is actually a really bad, really bad, tough business to be in. Yes. That's something that maybe, you know, is not a great idea.

But we have now put this on such a pedestal that like a couple is going to do this. Like, this is our job and we're going to make a fortune doing this. And it's going to be kind of a gamble, but this is going to be awesome. And Chip and Joanna are really responsible for part of that, I think, you know, don't you? Yeah, two things. One, I mean, listen, the home renovation show model. overall has sort of replaced the kind of treakly family sitcom in a lot of ways and a lot of people's lives. You know, it's the inciting incident is the buying of the house or the act with, you know,

that taking on the project and you just follow the narrative arc all the way to the big reveal at the end and everybody hugging just like on, you know, full house back in the day. And just like on full house, they have to keep introducing more and more children. And they'll actually for fixer-upper, it's more and more farm animals just to sort of like propel the plot forward in a really a necessary way. But the other thing is, I mean, you can't just, HGTV has tried to, not only is this fixer upper based on a, you know, a tradition of home Renault shows, but HGTV has tried to replicate fixer upper

15 times since the show went on the air. I mean, some of them are still on and some of them, you know, were disposed of on a Saturday evening on HGTV. The model isn't what works. It's Chip and Joanna are what works, right? I mean, it's their relationship that just comes through the screen. and I think you've got to give them all the credit in the world for that. It's the dad humor.

It really is. It's like a sitcom, right? It's the dad humor and it's the sort of shamelessness of their relationship, but I don't mean that as an insult. I mean, it's the way that he can tell the jokes without feeling like, you know, they feel like they're being fully themselves, even though they're clearly putting on a show. Yeah. Yeah.

They just feel like they're mildly interesting. They're mildly interesting to start and they're not over playing their hand, right? They're happy to be that. Just a nice, loving, you know, happy couple. Yeah. If you could quantify, if you could quantify that sort of on-screen charisma, they certainly have something. Before we drop the subject, though, I would just want you to know, I'm looking at the Magnolia Market online store right now and in the sale section amongst things like metal house planners and rose stems. You can buy script wall expressions ranging from $16 and $31 up to $32 on sale right now. If you want to have, if you want to have the word home in cursive and incursive metal on your kick. and wall, Brian, that's available for you right now. I think we need to add that to the press box studio here at Ringer headquarters. There's also a hanging circular chalkboard that says go the extra mile and then an arrow.

Wow. David, to transition here, I believe we've gone the extra mile today. I think so. Thank you for coming to do this. We're going to do more of these together. I hope so, man. This has been a lot of fun. It has.

Next week we're going to talk about Cletus the Fox football robot in his political statement. In his brave statement about health care in the United States of America. I'm Brian. He's David. Thanks for joining us on the press box and listen to all the other stuff on the Ringer podcast network.