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Love/Hate
A Past That Never Existed, a Future That Will Never Arrive
Lessons from watching every single Hallmark holiday movie
In November 2017, the Hallmark Channel released a movie called The Christmas Train, in which a Spielbergian movie producer (Danny Glover) stuffs a cross-country train full of actors to dupe two former war correspondents (Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Dermot Mulroney) into falling in love again. It also strongly implies that Glover is God. The night it aired, the movie was the most-watched show on cable, drawing 4.87 million viewers.
This year, Hallmark will release 22 more Christmas movies. The first offering in its Countdown to Christmas, an insultingly low-effort cash-in on eternal Jane Austen mania called Christmas at Pemberley Manor, snagged roughly 4.6 million total viewers. It’s a safe bet that all 21 movies that follow will easily vie for winning the night among non-sports cable offerings. The question then is: Just who the hell are these people?
I’m one. Last year, my friend David Roth and I started a podcast dedicated to sincerely reviewing these movies on their own terms, even if the process entails a lot of teasing about the channel’s conspicuous dedication to filling plots with literal angels, literal Santa Clauses, and overabundant ziggurats of dinner rolls. We did it for the same reason many people turned to marathoning beloved TV shows in the aftermath of the 2016 election: However implausible, soft, supernatural, or overdetermined they might be, their goal is to not be about our Hell World.
This is not to say that Hallmark films are not themselves problematic and accidentally reflective of our world. After more than 150 movies, the network only recently announced plans to film two about Hanukkah, and Jewish characters remain largely absent from its Christmas and other seasonal plots. While “gay best friend” roles are hinted at, their orientation exists only by implication; out-and-proud characters remain nonexistent. This is the first year in which the Countdown to Christmas features African-American leading characters, rather than “magical negro” trope-people whose sole purpose is shoving two useless white crushes toward their mutual destiny.
Despite their claims to…
