I can't stand Chip and Joanna Gaines
there, I said it
It’s been awhile since I watched anything from Magnolia Home’s Chip and Joanna Gaines. Maybe two years? A few nights ago, I tried to rectify that.
I barely got through a few episodes of their Lakehouse reno without throwing my remote at the TV screen. As for Joanna’s “Magnolia Table,” I made it through the Italian and Mexican shows before I found “The Flipping El Moussas,” then “Rico to the Rescue,” on HGTV to wash out the bile in my throat.
WTF happened to these two former HGTV stars? Too much of a good thing?
They were immediately branded by the viewing public as nice (the kiss of death for me), quirky, #couplegoals (gag), and fun. Nice usually means asshole in my personal experience, and I’m very rarely wrong.
On top of that, they claim to be devout Christians. Double-whammy, no thanks.
They don’t seem very nice now, at least in my view.
Instead, the idyllic couple come off quite full of themselves, greedy af, fake, coasting on their laurels, and slick.
I saw through the glad-handing, “charismatic” dynamic from the first episode, but put up with it, because I’m actually kind, I could be wrong, and their pros out-weighed the cons early in their TV career.
To me, Chip reverts to his goofy, shock-value persona to lighten the mood, break up the monotony, and hide a huge defensiveness inherent to men married to strong women who know what they want, want what they want now, and will finagle any means they believe is subtle and harmless and preserves their Mother Mary image to get it.
Very rarely will Joanna back down and let Chip have his way.
Again, my impressions.
Does Joanna use people like chess pieces in a board game of her own creation? You decide. She’s very exacting and if she experiences push-back, hesitation, or an awareness of the difficulty in her requests, she employs the sweetness-and-light technique of over-complimentary smoke up the ass.
See ham sandwich.
She treats her husband like a pet dog, and in turn, he keeps acting like a whipped fool, barking (sometimes literally) for more attention. Sure beats actually admitting:
you don’t know jack shit about design, at least compared to Her Highness
you’d like to tell her to fuck off just once about some stupid design concept you don’t want to do
A huge red flag when I saw the Queen of Shiplap barely interacting with Food Network star Molly Yeh (“Girl Meets Farm”) on “Magnolia Table.” Yeh posted on social media about the episode and meeting one of her heroes. Joanna, on the other hand, did not.
Fans say Joanna is just shy, private, slow to trust for probably good reason, and recently, has had to deal with physical pain from a cheerleading back injury (she gets around better than I do, however, pre-surgeries, and I’m 60, with arthritis and stenosis).
So what’s the deal with her attitude? Everything that annoyed me about her in the first HGTV “Fixer Upper” has come full circle and intensified, from her demanding, perfectionistic, fake-looking trying to get along and be this humble, gracious, inspirational Christian home-making designer icon, to her hyper-focused, insufferable, dismissive, ambitious conceits, prancing around on her IG like Mother Mary in the Texas countryside.
She couldn’t be bothered to post about meeting Molly Yeh once?!
The strong impression I got from watching that awkward, forced, one-sided cooking show love fest is that Joanna couldn’t stand to share the spotlight with another, younger, beautiful hapa (half-Caucasian, half-Asian), that Yeh was beneath her high standards or something. Projection on my part? Who knows…
This happens every time someone, anyone becomes famous. They suddenly think they can do it all. It’s not enough to design homes, shiplapping every square inch of wall space. No, now you’re a master home chef, focashia baker, restauranteur, gardener, magazine mogul…
It never ends. What’s next? A skincare line and multi-movie deal?
Your magazine — or what passes for a magazine — is shit, btw. My B-3 high school newswriting staff could produce 10 issues in their sleep that are a far sight better.
A lot of former fans/viewers have been trashing this couple to pieces. “Magnolia Table” — an exercise in going through the motions — was the final nail.
Go look on Reddit. Quite eye-opening.
(Reddit’s where I go when mainstream media won’t report the other side.)
Joanna doesn’t even seem to enjoy being in the limelight much, does she? It’s like she’s putting up with Chip’s stupid-assed antics, just to get him to put in hard labor to get the look she wants.
If I let him eat the decomposed cat/termite rot/rat droppings, then he’ll reframe the kitchen and paint it a totally different color (green, perhaps?) after doing all the work for nothing…
Her cooking show is just her self-indulging whims like crazy, in a fancy, very expensive kitchen she had him and his crew build for her from scratch. The food looks good, albeit a little sterile and white bread — even if you don’t get all of the recipes, but is it as good and deserving as a half a dozen culinary-trained chefs and home cooks? Probably not.
Eating her food must be what eating plastic Barbies tastes like.
I guess I’m just tired of their shitty personalities and overreach.
Before, I really had Magnolia in Waco on my bucket travel list. Now, I’d just as soon watch walking tours of more exciting towns, like Madrid or Tokyo.