Airs: Tuesdays at 10:00/9:00c on HGTV
TV show equation: Home Town = Fixer Upper – 1/2 Asian – Texas + Mississippi
Premise in a Sentence: Fixer Upper in Mississippi.
Really, I just wanted to use this post as a way to tell all of my Fixer Upper fans that if you aren’t watching Home Town, you should be. But I guess I can go a little more in depth.
The show follows Erin and Ben Napier as they try and save their small town of Laurel, Mississippi by renovating one house at a time. She is a designer and he is the handyman. Sound familiar? This show was always going to be compared to it’s Texan cousin, mainly because it is obviously HGTV’s attempt to recapture that Fixer Upper magic. I am happy to report that it holds up pretty well in comparison. I am even going to make a bold statement and say that the Napiers have had a more promising start than the Gaines’. Have you ever gone back and watched those early episodes of Fixer Upper? It’s disconcerting. Chip is not his Chip-py self, he barely even cares about demo day, and Joanna is clearly uncomfortable on camera. Not so with the Napiers. They had the banter and dorky humor down pretty quick, perhaps because they had a pretty good example of a winning formula.
Ben Napier is not quite as entertaining Chip, but his resourcefulness makes up for it in my book. He is quite the Mr. Fix-It and seems more than capable when it comes to building furniture, restoring construction, and coming up with solutions to make Erin’s designs work. Erin’s design aesthetic has a nice lived-in element to it, but it has variety. Every project thus far has felt different while still having her stamp on it. The best way I can describe it is that she seems to like a lot of stuff on the walls, but in a good way. The town of Laurel seems to have more of a small town quality than Waco and the houses have more historic character.
Like I said, it’s pretty hard not to compare the two, but both shows come out of the comparison in good shape. Part of me wonders if they should have just gone the Flip or Flop way and just called this Fixer Upper: Mississippi, but I am happy to see seemingly nice people get their own platform. Fixer Upper is always going to be my go-to HGTV viewing, but I am happy to have Home Town in the off season.
–Ellen
Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the film for which we bought our tickets weeks in advance, was getting slightly less glowing reviews than it’s predecessor. She told me, “Go into this movie thinking that’s it’s only OK, and it will probably exceed your expectations.”
alphabet. You could say we both bring things to the table.
If I’m being honest, it wasn’t Ellen’s fault. She was just trying to shield us both from potential disappointment. But I can’t help but wonder what my experience of this movie might have been if I hadn’t spent the whole 136 minute run-time wondering which of it’s glaring flaws I was missing. I learned that I’d rather be surprised by life’s occasional disappointments rather than spend my time anticipating them. The pop culture landscape is such that 
them to decide which movies to see, or you use them to validate opinions you already had, I think that the brain trusts over at Entertainment Weekly have officially outlived their usefulness.
Fangirly 