I have recently developed a minor ailment, something of which I am not ashamed and yet do not broadcast to the public lest it change their opinion of me as an elegant tastemaker. But I do not believe in guilty pleasures, so here goes. I am obsessed with the Food Network original program Guy’s Grocery Games, and I will watch as many consecutive episodes as the Food Network will feed me.
Guy Fieri does the same joke in every episode of Guy’s Grocery Games. At the beginning of each round, when the cheftestants have just heard the kooky limitations of their next challenge (mandatory marshmallow fluff in their chicken-fried steak or a punishingly small grocery cart), they stand poised at the starting line, nervous, eager to be unleashed upon Flavortown Market. They cannot begin to shop and cook until Guy Fieri says the magic words that begin His games: “Three, two, one, GO!”
As the cheftestants have recently discovered—assuming that this is their first time on television—most of show business is waiting around while people with complicated belts move heavy things that you are not allowed to touch. Then, once every couple of hours, a lot happens, briefly. It doesn’t take very long on a set to figure out that, no, we’re not starting yet. Only dorks are rarin’ to go. Here Fieri springs his trap.
Exploiting the cheftestants’ faith in their newfound expertise—their certainty that nothing is happening yet—he looks down at his cards and up again, nonchalant, just making chitchat. He points his toe and draws a lazy figure eight on the linoleum. They are probably just waiting for the grip to fix something with the lights, the cheftestants figure, or maybe camera is unsatisfied. Maybe someone from electrical has diarrhea. “You know,” Fieri might say in this moment, this uneasy limbo, “Three Dog Night is a great band.” The cheftestants nod politely at the small talk; maybe one gamely joins in, “Yeah, so great!”
“I saw them two years ago at the Clearwater Casino,” Fieri goes on.
A pause.
“But they didn’t play ‘One (Is the Loneliest Number).’”
Another pause.
“I had to go ask for my money back.”
The pause quickens. Fieri looks at the cheftestants expectantly. They look back. He looks. They look. They can tell he wants something from them, but what? Fieri’s eyes begin to twinkle. This is the frisson he lives for.
This is his moment.
He turns to the judges and shrugs ostentatiously. Aarti Sequeira bites her fist and bounces a little in her seat; she yearns to spill the beans. Fieri turns and looks straight into the camera—every time, he does this—and says something like “Not so quick, are they?”
At last the cheftestants get it. The magic words! They were hidden in Fieri’s anecdote about the seventies boogie rock group Three Dog Night! Their time! Their precious, already comically inadequate time!
As the cheftestants panic and scatter—tasked with the compound indignity of preparing a killer chicken parm in twenty minutes using only ingredients from odd-numbered aisles while having just been pranked by a human flip-flop—Fieri luxuriates in his deception. He chuckles to himself, he rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “Now they got it,” he says. Those idiots.
Fieri does this literally every time. He never, not once, has ever said, “Three, two, one, GO!” in the normal fashion. Yet somehow it works every time. The cheftestants are fooled every time. Fieri cannot believe his own genius every time. I am obsessed.
Guy’s Grocery Games is currently in its eighteenth season.
There are three possible explanations for the persistent effectiveness of the three-two-one-GO gag:
1. No cheftestant who appears on Guy’s Grocery Games has ever watched an episode of Guy’s Grocery Games.
2. The cheftestants are humoring Fieri as though he were a child they cannot bear to disappoint.
3. The bit is sanctioned and staged by the producers as a classic element of Triple G.
Obviously, number three is most likely. But I prefer to believe it’s number two, that the world is good and kind, at least in Flavortown.
My favorite thing about Guy Fieri is that he is objectively terrible at talking about food and only says four things (“That’s the real deal!” “You’ve got the salty from the pork, the sweet from the sauce, the crunchy from the lettuce, that’s the real deal right there!” “Killer!” “This is Flavortown, baby.”). Occasionally, he interacts with actual celebrity chefs—in, perhaps, a Triple G Blazin’ Bitchin’ All Starz Edition: Flame-Broiled or BUST, BAYBEE. One’s heart leaps to one’s throat. Will our boy be embarrassed? Will the chefs smirk and be cruel? Will they tell him that “amazeballs” is not a word or decline his humble offering of Donkey Sauce? But what happens is the opposite: A glowing kindness floods the studio. The chefs smile at Guy, they encourage him, they cheer him, they compete in his Grocery Games as though they were chasing Olympic gold. It is pure sweetness.
There is something irresistibly endearing about Guy Fieri, perhaps not in spite of his gaucherie as a broadcaster but because of it. Watching deeply competent colleagues humor and encourage this strange saxophone of a man as he bungles around like a golden retriever is medicine. It is okay to like this dog and his bungling. This is a difficult time, and it is okay to go to another place once in a while. Donald Trump is not the president of Flavortown.
But, and here I reach my point: as much as Triple-G is a balm for my soul, when that day comes that it is revealed that Guy Fieri owns a puppy mill or did 9/11, he will pass from my life like so many before him. This is the slow, dumb work of progress.
Chip and Joanna Gaines fix up houses. Chip, a strapping blond man who looks like he is named Chip, does the construction, and Joanna, one of those infuriating people who seems to be smart and funny and talented and pretty and nice, is in charge of design. The formula of their show Fixer Upper, which ran for five seasons on HGTV, was simple but foolproof: First, live in Waco, Texas, where 14,000-square-foot midcentury mansions somehow cost $74,000. Knock down all interior walls. Cover every surface in “shiplap,” which is expensive for “boards.” Add one wall clock the size of Jupiter’s moon Callisto. Contract local youth pastor/blacksmith to create custom art piece spelling the family’s last name out in reclaimed horseshoes. Repeat.
The big reason to love Chip and JoJo is for the banter. Regularly, throughout each episode, the action will pause and Chip and JoJo will address the camera about the trials and tribulations on the job site and at their home, which they share with their forty perfect children. They generate charming bloopers. They laugh and tease each other. Sometimes Chip will get a little hornay and honk JoJo’s butt. They are keeping it tight and keeping the spice alive. They are, as the adults trying to sound like the kids say, #relationship #goals—the type of love that none of us deserves. They are ravenously beloved, by me as much as anyone.
Fixer Upper ended its run in 2018, not out of a lack of public interest in Chip and JoJo but the extravagant opposite. In addition to their brick-and-mortar store, Magnolia Market, they also have a print magazine, The Magnolia Journal ($7.99 an issue), and, a year after the end of Fixer Upper, the couple announced that they would be developing their own entire television network, the Magnolia Network. “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 Magnolia Network is scheduled to debut in the summer of 2020, and based on my calculations of their professional trajectory, Chip and JoJo will be … beepboop-beep-beep-beep-boop-boop … fully running the galaxy by 2028. Well, to be more specific, JoJo will be Glorious Milky Way Hegemon of Earth and Void, and Chip will be Intergalactic Minister of Dropping a Space Hammer on His Foot Because He Saw a Centipede.
But there was a perilous moment, in December 2016, when the prospect of a business venture dedicated to more of the Gaineses’ universe might not have seemed like a wise business move. BuzzFeed published a story that very briefly threatened to upend the Gaines empire, to much handwringing in both the pro-Gaines and Gaines-critical camps.
BuzzFeed reported that the Gaineses were members of Antioch Community Church, a megachurch whose pastor, BuzzFeed said, described the HGTV stars as “dear friends.” That same pastor, Jimmy Seibert, unfortunately for the Gaineses but more unfortunately for any gay children in his congregation, also disapproves of marriage equality and believes that conversion therapy is a good and reasonable thing to do to LGBTQ children.
I assume it goes without saying among the readers of this book, but you cannot “convert” people from the essence of their being, and even if you could, you should not, and even if being gay or trans wasn’t the essence of a person’s being, you still should just let that person fucking live how they want to, and the way that many religious organizations do try to “convert” gay kids to being straight is cruel, traumatizing, and painful. Sam Brinton, the director of advocacy at the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ youth, has written about surviving conversion therapy. Brinton, who is gender fluid and uses they/them pronouns, endured a counselor saying that Brinton was an abomination who would get HIV and AIDS. The torture was physical, too:
The therapist ordered me bound to a table to have ice, heat, and electricity applied to my body. I was forced to watch clips on a television of gay men holding hands, hugging, and having sex. I was supposed to associate those images with the pain I was feeling to once and for all turn into a straight boy.
That kind of treatment—still legal in forty-one American states in 2019!—is what Chip and JoJo’s spiritual leader believes in. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics all call it harmful. According to the BuzzFeed report, in a sermon after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, Seibert preached:
We can change, contrary to what you hear. I’ve worked with people for over 30 years—I have seen hundreds of people personally change their direction of same-sex attraction from a homosexual lifestyle to a heterosexual lifestyle. It doesn’t mean they don’t struggle with feelings, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t hurting, it doesn’t mean it’s not challenging. But they have chosen to change. And there has always been grace there for those who choose that.
Okay, buddy.
Defenders of Chip and JoJo were fierce in their outrage. How dare BuzzFeed pry into the private lives of such cheery and deadly charismatic celebrities? What about freedom of religion? How is their religious practice any of anyone’s business, and how do we even know they agree with the church’s stance on conversion therapy?
Twitter was aflame. The Washington Post ran an op-ed titled “BuzzFeed’s Hit Piece on Chip and Joanna Gaines Is Dangerous” (witch hunt!), which argued that attending a homophobic church is fine because lots of people in the United States are homophobic.
Pastor Seibert, for his part, responded to the controversy in an audio interview with Tony fucking Perkins, of all people, surely to the pure delight and nothing-remotely-approaching-an-aneurysm of Chip and JoJo’s PR team. Perkins, a truly evil quack, is the longtime president of the anti-LGBTQ extremist organization the Family Research Council, who relentlessly pushes the false claim that gay men are more likely to abuse children (pedophilia is “a homosexual problem,” he says), insists that gay rights activism will lead to violence against Christians, and lobbied doggedly against antibullying policies implemented after a spate of LGBT teen suicides. A cool and totally normal guy! I’m sure we all have dear friends of dear friends who say things like this jewel from Perkins’s close associate, the Executive Vice President of the Family Research Council: “[Islam] should not be protected under the First Amendment, particularly given that those following the dictates of the Quran are under an obligation to destroy our Constitution and replace it with sharia law.”
Thousands of people attend Antioch Church in Waco. It is a megachurch. We have no information as to how often Chip and Joanna actually attend, how seriously they adhere to Antioch’s tenets, what they might have found personally healing or comforting in that spiritual community, whether they actually consider Seibert a “dear friend” or if he was just blowing smoke up his own ass. Two congregants cannot reasonably be expected to repair every moral flaw in their church’s entrenched culture, and it is, perhaps, a slippery slope to consider an HGTV celebrity tainted by way of which virulent bigot to whom their pastor chooses to grant his first post-homophobia-scandal interview. It is certainly arguable that that’s a degree of separation too far. But man, it just sucks. And we should be able to say it sucks without histrionic op-eds calling us “dangerous.”
Eventually Chip addressed the controversy himself, writing (rather noncommittally):
Joanna and I have personal convictions. One of them is this: we care about you for the simple fact that you are a person, our neighbor on planet earth. It’s not about what color your skin is, how much money you have in the bank, your political affiliation, sexual orientation, gender, nationality or faith …
We are not about to get in the nasty business of throwing stones at each other—don’t ask us to cause we won’t play that way.
Come on, man, just disavow that shit! You’re killing us! We love the banter and the buns honking! Do it for the banter, or MAYBE DO IT FOR THE LGBTQ YOUTH SUICIDE RATES.
Observant viewers pointed out that—despite Chip’s assertions that he and his wife don’t throw stones at all human beings equally—Fixer Upper had not featured a single gay couple in its four seasons on the air, a rarity on an extremely gay network. The show fixed that omission in season five.
Two days after the BuzzFeed story was published, HGTV released the following statement: “We don’t discriminate against members of the LGBT community in any of our shows. HGTV is proud to have a crystal clear, consistent record of including people from all walks of life in its series.”
And it worked. The controversy died away. For the general public, that torture-gay-people-until-they’re-straight bombshell did not stick, and—in the usual way of things—will instead impact only Fixer Upper’s LGBTQ fans and their allies, who now have to think about conversion therapy every time they want to watch the (maybe) deserving citizens of Waco, Texas, obtain slightly nicer sconces.
There’s an insidious meme format that’s been circulating regularly since the 2016 election. It’s usually a photo of two white people standing, smiling, next to a barbecue grill. Maybe they are wearing sports memorabilia from the same team. Maybe they are sharing Thanksgiving leftovers. The caption usually reads something like “This is Donk. He’s my neighbor. He voted for Trump. I voted for Hillary! That doesn’t stop us from watching the big game together on the game day! Nachos and darts! CONNECTION, not DIVISION, is what is going to save this country!!!!!!!! [AMERICAN FLAG EMOJI BICEPS EMOJI, HEART EMOJI, ONE BIG EYE ONE SMALL EYE DIAGONAL TONGUE EMOJI].”
Now, it is true that it is good, potentially, to know and respectfully share ideas across cultural and political borders. It is not illegal to have bad, even evil, ideas, nor should it be. But there’s a reason why these memes are almost always made by white people about white people. It is not good or healing or compulsory for marginalized people to connect with those who disagree that they should get to be full human beings under the law. Not everyone has the luxury of detaching from politics for an afternoon to eat a hot dog. And yes, I know this is complicated. I love Chip and JoJo, too.
Inevitably, in any critical analysis of pop culture like this, there comes a point when one party throws up his or her hands and asks, Why aren’t we allowed to just have fun sometimes? Whatever happened to escapism? It’s just a TV show! Let the people have the TV show!
And look, I am an escapism queen. I love to have the TV show. But what good is a vacation if certain people are dehumanized and tortured there? That’s going to be a ZERO STARS from me, dog!
Sidestepping reality—whether you genuinely believe in, say, conversion therapy or just don’t want to deal with some bullshit your pastor got you into—is choosing the lie. This is what I’ll never understand about that tactic: people are dying to forgive you if you just live in the truth.
Since the 2016 election, conservative celebrities have been complaining that their political views make them unpopular in Hollywood. “Hollywood Conservatives Say More Stars Stay Quiet to Avoid Public Backlash, Being Blacklisted,” read a Fox News headline in 2018. “There used to be more of us,” eighty-four-year-old Pat Boone told The Hollywood Reporter. “Tom Selleck, Jon Voight, Bruce Willis, who were outspoken, but they’ve been browbeaten and ridiculed, which is the main instrument on the left to shut us up.” James Woods is forever whining on Twitter. Tim Allen says that doing comedy right now “is like dancing on the thinnest ice.”
Well, good! I’m glad this is uncomfortable for you! The partisan divide is not insignificant or cute. Children are dying in ICE custody. In May 2019, twenty-three-year-old Muhlaysia Booker was killed in Dallas (just a ninety-minute drive from Waco), the fifth black trans woman to be murdered that year. It is not, as Chip wrote, “throwing stones at each other” to point out that these things are incompatible with basic morality. There is value in understanding those who disagree with you—some of us want to go wild on the backsplash with a pop of Moroccan tile, and some of us are white subway tile to the bone—but we’re not living in a meme. There is no value in willfully ignoring hatred, and the lie that neutrality in the face of oppression is not a political stance is part of how we got here.
People are not binary. We are not good or bad, saintly or irredeemable. There’s nothing wrong in asking for accountability and an acknowledgment of shared humanity from the people we admire, the people building the culture our children will grow up in, the people to whom we give our money. Who doesn’t want to be better? What—you want to stay bad or get worse out of spite?
Every person is, to varying degrees, a fixer upper (SORRY1). Go salvage some shiplap.
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1 JUST KIDDING I’M NOT SORRY AT ALL SUBMIT THIS SENTENCE TO THE PULITZER COMMITTEE.