Christina Hall and Tarek El Moussa have both had a long and successful history with HGTV. The two started down their road to home renovation fame with Flip or Flop, which ended after the 10-year mark in 2022 after a few tumultuous years behind the scenes because of their 2016 split. So, fans were quite surprised when it was announced in the spring that they would return for their first joint series, The Flip Off, after the one that made them household names. Now we know why HGTV is getting into the reality competition business with the former couple, and who came up with those wild look-alike promos for the new show.
Why Is HGTV Doing A Reality Competition With Christina Hall And Tarek El Moussa?
Though Christina Hall and Tarek El Moussa have moved on romantically (he with Selling Sunset star Heather Rae and their son, Tristan) and with their own renovation shows on the ultra popular real estate-focused network, they’ve decided to join forces on TV once again by competing against one another on The Flip Off. The show will have them each renovate a home and flip it, with the one gaining the biggest profit after that sale winning the season. As Hall told Yahoo Entertainment recently, the idea came about pretty naturally now that the exes are “friendly” while co-parenting their two children, Taylor and Brayden:
When speaking with the network, they were telling me competition shows are doing so well right now. And so then I kinda started the idea in my head: what would that look like? Josh [Hall] and I spoke to Tarek and Heather about it and they were in, and so we approached the network with this idea and they were like ‘100 percent.’ And so here we are.
As she said, the original idea was for El Moussa and his new wife and Hall and her husband, Josh Hall, to compete against each other as couples. However, the Halls recently filed for divorce separately (with Josh having an HGTV-related request), and while there had been some confusion over how that awkwardness would affect the upcoming competition (which will debut with a two-hour premiere at some point in early 2025), we now know that Christina will simply work on her own against Tarek and Heather.
The mom of three (she also has one son, Hudson, with ex-husband Ant Anstead) was wondering “what it would look like to bring a flipping show back” after rediscovering her love for the process as she flipped homes in Tennessee. But, she revealed that conversations with Heather led to her coming up with the wild promo ideas for The Flip Off, which have played on obvious physical similarities between the two women. As she noted:
My [promo] ideas were just kinda like — in talking with Heather, something that people always say is ‘Oh, they look so much alike and Tarek has a type.’ So our whole joke [was to] play on that, just taking things that people say about us and just kind of like throwing it back in a joking way.
Though the first official teaser for the series, which announced the title and release window, was much more straight-forward, no one can argue with the fact that playing around with how much Heather and Christina look alike and addressing people’s comments about it in a fun way has certainly upped anticipation for the competition to come.