HGTV’s Roster of Power (Tool) Couples

In 2012, Lindsey Weidhorn was working in programming at HGTV, developing a potential series about a married remodeling team in Texas. Reviewing the interview segments in the pilot her team had shot, Weidhorn found herself underwhelmed by the husband’s on-camera presence.

“I thought, does this guy even talk?” Weidhorn said.

The guy in question was Chip Gaines of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper.” He and the show now have millions of fans — few of whom would describe him as quiet. As Weidhorn continued reviewing the tape, she noticed something.

“In the footage where it wasn’t just ‘only talk about the house,’ there was the charm,” Weidhorn said. “Chip makes a bad joke, Joanna rolls her eyes, Chip laughs about how bad his joke is.” It was a light bulb moment. “I realized Chip and Joanna are people,” Weidhorn said. “I like their relationship. We want to be able to tell their story, not just the story of a house.” The final cut of the pilot allowed for plenty of their natural banter.

The rest is cable history. “Fixer Upper” became a mansion-size hit, the Gaineses celebrities with an empire that includes a sprawling Waco shopping complex, vacation rentals, restaurants, paint and décor lines, a Target home collection and a quarterly magazine. But after five seasons, “Fixer Upper” has ended — the final new episode aired Tuesday.

For HGTV, their departure is a major loss. But the couple’s success provided the network with a formula for filling the ratings sinkhole they’ll leave behind: Make shows about charismatic twosomes from underexplored parts of the country.

HGTV is applying this formula vigorously; 19 of its current series are toplined by duos, with more on the way. Some of the emerging shows star siblings (“Restored by the Fords”) or parent-child teams (“Good Bones”), but most revolve around couples.

“You can’t make another Chip and Jo,” said Weidhorn, who still works with HGTV, now as the head of her own unscripted-content production company, 547 Barnard. “They had their own lifestyle, their own world. But you can set out to find duos who make viewers say, ‘Relationship goals!’ or ‘Hey, I talk to my brother like that.’ Viewers like to see their own relationships reflected in the talent.”

Many of those viewers are enjoying the network in twos. “The fact is, our viewers are duos themselves,” said Kathleen Finch, chief lifestyle brands officer for Discovery Inc., which owns HGTV. “What we hear is, ‘My husband and I sit on the couch together and watch.'” HGTV is so focused on finding talent that reflects that audience, it sometimes lets the couch couples cross through the screen. Three years ago, Dave and Chenoa Rivera — who left their tourism and medical sales jobs to start renovating properties in Paradise, California — were two of the viewers Finch describes.

“We had been watching ‘Flip or Flop,’ and I was like, ‘Hey, we do this,'” Chenoa Rivera said by phone.

She sent HGTV’s casting inbox an email that described the renovation projects she and Dave Rivera collaborate on and included their family Christmas photo. A year later, she heard from a producer. The Riveras shot a pilot and eventually got a series greenlight. Their show, “Rustic Rehab,” which has its premiere on April 26, paints them as savvy and down-to-earth, can-do hustlers in a woodsy corner of California.

Conceptually, “Rehab” follows the blueprint of “Flip or Flop,” the franchise that has become HGTV’s go-to format for breaking couple talent. Network executives are especially excited about two in particular: “Flip or Flop Vegas,” with mixed martial arts fighter Bristol Marunde and his Realtor wife, Aubrey; and “Flip or Flop Nashville,” with former NFL player DeRon Jenkins and Page Turner, a real estate broker.

“Bristol and Aubrey’s projects all have this fun, blingy vibe,” Finch said. “DeRon and Page are exes, which adds this sweet element to the show: They’ll roll their eyes at things and say, ‘And that’s why we’re not together anymore.'” The shows’ initial seasons have averaged around 1.2 million viewers per episode. (By comparison: “Fixer Upper” has averaged 2.8 million viewers per episode in its fifth and final season.)

Then there are the original “Flip or Flop” stars: Christina and Tarek El Moussa, who recently shot their first episodes since 2016, for a new season that starts May 31. The El Moussas drew “through-the-roof, gangbusters” numbers for HGTV, according to Finch; their return to the network will probably do even better. That’s because the El Moussas have divorced — proving, in the process, how heavily invested their fans were in their personal lives. A $13.99 all-HGTV edition of “People” currently on newsstands dedicates eight pages to the former couple, calling them “devoted to their kids — and their hit show” and chronicling Christina El Moussa’s post-divorce dating life.

The magazine is more evidence that the network’s duos have blown past the traditional star potential of home-television talent. (“It’s like the Tiger Beat of HGTV!” Finch said.)

But HGTV stars need more than chemistry and interesting personal lives: They have to actually know their way around a hammer or at least look and sound as if they do on television.

Which leads to hires like the mellow, Pittsburgh-based Leanne and Steve Ford, of “Restored by the Fords.” The siblings have been at their respective trades for years — hers in design, his in construction — and their signature style skews more modern and minimal than the typical HGTV aesthetic.

“Restored by the Fords” debuted in January and has averaged nearly 1.7 million viewers per episode (it is HGTV’s best-rated new program this year among viewers 25 to 54). So “Fords” is off to a good start, and its stars’ profiles are on the rise. “Our Instagrams are booming,” Leanne Ford said by phone.

Steve Ford, conferenced in on the same call, went silent for a moment.

“Steve?” Leanne Ford said, an edge of sisterly annoyance creeping into her voice.

Steve Ford apologized. “Somebody just drove by and yelled over the fence to me, ‘Hey, we like your show!'” he said, sounding bewildered.

Bewilderment does seem to be the de facto response to becoming an HGTV power duo, even for the Gaineses. “No matter how many times someone asks me to sign their hat or asks Jo for a picture, it still feels surreal,” Chip Gaines, whose memoir “Capital Gaines” is a best seller, wrote in an email during an earlier interview. “We don’t think of ourselves as ‘famous’ even now.”

Erin Napier, a co-host of “Home Town,” can empathize. On her show, she and her husband, Ben, renovate homes in Laurel, Mississippi, where they grew up. In its second season, “Home Town” was watched by an average of 1.5 million viewers per episode — the fame that has followed has made Laurel feel somehow even smaller to Erin Napier.

“I am an introvert,” she said by phone. “I get anxious when people who don’t know me want to talk at the grocery store.”

Ben Napier, a woodworker, was nearby with their 3-month-old daughter, Helen. “People are spending their spring breaks in Laurel,” he said. “If you’d told me that 10 years ago, I’d have laughed.” (He might have taken a lesson from the trajectory of the Gaineses, who have brought more tourists to Waco — the vacation rentals they own sometimes sell out up to a year in advance.) In Laurel, “Home Town” fans shop for goods inspired by the show at the Napiers’ Front Street boutique, Laurel Mercantile Co., and cruise past the couple’s 1920s Craftsman home.

“I was planting flowers on my front porch earlier today,” Erin Napier said. “About 15 tourists drove by and filmed me doing it.”

Such anecdotes hint at why HGTV’s duos have become so popular — and crucial to the network’s success. They blur the line between fame and regular life, talking on TV the way you imagine they would if you invited them to dinner.

But Erin Napier suspects there’s something more subtle drawing people to her show and her street. “Home Town” — like many HGTV shows — celebrates common experiences that other types of TV ignore or mock: married life, modest budgets, settling down in the place where you grew up.

“When I was a teenager, I thought I was going to go work in publishing in New York,” Erin Napier said. “But once I left Laurel, I realized how special it was. It didn’t matter that it was small. I thought, if the opportunity I want isn’t there — well, I’ll just make it.”

So she returned. She married Ben Napier, who plays a lumberjack mascot at town events. Together they found stardom on a network that learned a lesson about construction down in Waco six years back: Put two authentic-seeming people on camera, and the audience will follow them — sometimes, all the way to their front porch.