Nerding Day: Human Vs. Hamster🌭

From the celebrity power couple who brought you a beige rug that costs eight thousand dollars, a set of beige mixing bowls for ninety dollars, and a game of Connect Four vastly improved by being made colorless and impossible to play, also it’s a hundred and fifty dollars (down from $190!), comes an exciting new game show! You’re never going to believe which one it is.

You would think that Chip and Joanna Gaines, the media moguls who turned their HGTV show Fixer Upper into several retail stores, a line at Target, a magazine, and finally, their own television channel, would only create sad beige game shows. I’m picturing an oatmeal eating competition? Maybe something where women compete to see who can clap the politest. No, Chip and Joanna Gaines somehow became the executive producers of Human vs. Hamster, one of the least dignified shows on television and as we all know MILF Manor exists, so that’s really saying something.

Chip and Joanna Gaines are so famous that if you ask a certain group of young women what they know about Waco, Texas, they will say, “It’s the home of Chip and Joanna Gaines!” and nothing else. They think of beige Connect Four when they think of Waco, and I’m sure the tourism board of Waco, Texas, could not be more thrilled about that.

The Magnolia Network, which Chip and Joanna run, is primarily focused on home decoration but expanded into a few food shows, and then in 2024, it expanded into hamster. Human vs. Hamster is a show that really tests the limits of what humans are willing to do for a very small amount of prize money. Most contestants walk away with two or three grand; if a team does really well, they might take home around eight grand split two ways, which isn’t nothing, but I would need a lot more money to gnaw through a noodle rope on television.

The premise of the show is that Chip and Joanna Gaines have built Saw-like games and obstacle courses for hamsters and then scaled them up exactly to human size. Humans have to run on a hamster wheel to raise a rocket ship to a tiny fake moon; they tumble through a forest of 150-pound juice boxes and balance on giant dominoes. Sometimes, there are side challenges where they have to do things hamsters are known for, like squeeze into a bottle or eat corn fast. I guess that’s a thing I think of when I think of hamsters? There’s no competition to struggle against being dropped by a giant ten-year-old, which we all know is really a hamster’s greatest challenge.

Human vs. Hamster treated its contestants with a wide range of dignity. When they had teachers and nurses on, the vibe was, “Wow, you’re all such heroes, ok now squeeze into the glass bottle like a hamster as quickly as you can, hero!” Which, I guess, is the respect we should give to public servants before we make them squeeze into a bottle because that’s a thing hamsters do.

However, when magicians and dancers come on the show, they force them to eat garbage in almost every competition. They’re chewing the pasta rope. They’re facing off against a hamster in a corn-on-the-cob eating challenge. An adult man is crawling around a maze to locate a very cold-looking slice of pizza and a stale cookie to eat. A lot of people were concerned about how the Hamsters were treated during filming. I’m concerned about the magicians, a phrase I have written many times before, but never in a sympathetic way.

Someone claiming to be a contestant on the show said on Reddit that the hamsters were recorded separately, and the humans simply competed against their times. So, I guess don’t worry about hamsters being harmed in the making of this show. They’re doing normal hamster stuff. It’s basically The Real Housewives Of Hamster for them.

Let’s talk about the energy the hosts are bringing to the show. It’s hosted by SNL’s Sarah Sherman, Kyle Brandt, who I’m told is some sort of football man, and in-house hamster expert, Brian Balthazar. Sarah Sherman seems almost uncomfortable with the forced hamsterization of the contestants, while the football man has never been more comfortable with anything in his entire life. If he could force-feed plain spaghetti to the magicians all day, he totally would. Brian Balthazar is there for the pageantry of the show. He pops in with elaborate background stories for each competing hamster and real hamster facts, and then I’m sure he goes back to his trailer and never thinks about hamsters for even one more second of the day. I guess I’m proud of him?

Sarah and the football man do commentary while the contestants battle the hamsters, and you can tell it’s really hard to make a person crawling through a little ball maze to find pizza slices not sound dystopian and terrible. Sarah clearly struggles with it. The football man grew up in Head Injury City, so this looks like a kindness to him. Chip and Joanna tried to give the show an American Gladiators feel, which is kind of funny, but also, it’s really hard to shit-talk a hamster or to create any kind of urgency or drama around the idea that humanity must prove ourselves against these hamsters. You can’t fight an animal named Ham without looking ridiculous.

There’s no amount of hamsters I’m afraid of. I think a human could kill nine million hamsters without even trying. The tasks are specifically designed for hamsters to be good at and humans to find difficult, and still, the hamsters lose sometimes, mainly because they have no idea that they’re on a competition show. They’ll stop to take a bath for five minutes while a human dangles precariously from a ladder. It doesn’t look good for anyone. There are truly no winners here. Both human and hamster come out looking like douchebags.

Ok, so one species is losing a little more. They should make the hamsters do some human stuff. Redesign this 1950s kitchen with a modern farmhouse aesthetic, hamster. Oh, you’re colorblind? Wow, that’s probably going to make things really difficult for you. Kind of like how it’s hard for these poor dentists with inflexible spines to quickly move through a series of tunnels in pursuit of a toy badger, dick. Sorry, I’m not sure why I suddenly got so mad at the hamsters. It’s not like they produced the show.

It would have made so much more sense if the show were about Joanna Gaines training hamsters to do interior design. The few months The Magnolia Channel spent promoting Human vs. Hamster on social media were so chaotic. Look at this snap of their Instagram grid. You’ve got a sweet potato casserole in a beautiful rustic casserole dish, then two women chowing down on corn like their life depends on it, locked in battle with a fancy rat. A gorgeous, curated breakfast nook, and Sarah Sherman about to force a man to chase a hamster through a series of plastic tubes. Joanna Gaines probably saw this grid and canceled the show herself.

The Magnolia Channel attempted two other competition shows at the same time as Human vs. Hamster. One of them was an artistic roller skating show called Roller Jam, so they were really taking some big swings. The third was a fairly typical singing competition, but like the other two competition shows, it also failed to get renewed. In fact, rumor has it that The Magnolia Network might not be doing so well.

My theory on what happened here is that we should blame Discovery CEO David Zaslav. He had a hand in creating The Magnolia Network and Human vs. Hamster has his fingerprints all over it. Chip and Joanna got some bad business advice from a friend whose idea of great art is 90 Day Fiance. They’ll be fine, though. There will always be people who want to buy beige mixing bowls. The audience for people who want to watch their fellow humans crawl around in hamster tubes for three thousand dollars is, thankfully, a lot smaller.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Craig Lemoine, who will absolutely destroy any amount of hamsters you throw at him. He’s done it before, and he’ll do it again.