Mina Starsiak Hawk credited HGTV veterans Chip and Joanna Gaines for helping her show, Good Bones, thrive with its honest and real depiction of her life.
During an episode of her “Mina AF” podcast on Tuesday, March 5, Mina, 39, chatted with sociologist Danielle Lindemann about being on reality TV. She touched upon people asking her if Good Bones, which aired its series finale in October 2023, was real.
“I think there’s a little bit of truth to everything,” the HGTV personality said. “To every character, to every story, and for me, my experience and what HGTV showed of me, my family and my business was all 100 percent real, and my mom and I, when we started it, we had a conversation together and with the network because older genres of HGTV were much more host mentality where you just pop someone in, and they’re Vanna Whiting a beautiful kitchen.”
Mina believes it was Chip and Joanna’s Fixer Upper that allowed for the trajectory of HGTV programming to take a step forward.
“Honestly, I personally think it was with Fixer Upper when everything started to change, and they actually, with this huge boom with social media, were finding real people, who had real businesses, doing these things themselves, and Fixer Upper was the first one and really kind of changed the direction at least HGTV was going in because they weren’t hosts,” she continued.
“You weren’t just getting paid a host rate to jump in. You were trying to run a business and host your show and be yourself and run a family,” Mina said of Chip, 49, and Joanna, 45, and their hit series.
The couple ended up leaving HGTV in 2017 after five seasons and are continuing to grow their incredibly successful Magnolia empire in Waco, Texas. Mina and her mom, Karen E. Laine, marked their first season of Good Bones in 2016.
“We talked to the network and said we really want to make sure if we’re gonna do this, it needs to be real,” Mina recalled. The home renovator also revealed that she used to not watch HGTV because it felt “staged and fake.”
All in all, Mina wants Good Bones fans to know that she was her honest and authentic self in each episode throughout all eight seasons.
“What was portrayed on the show is all true and all accurate, and we filmed year-round 13 episodes,” she revealed. “Each episode is edited down to actually 42 minutes of TV, so when you do that math, it’s a blip on the radar of what the year is.”
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