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…
