Hallmark the Herald Angels Sing

HALLMARK THE HERALD ANGELS SING

By David W. Brown

Suppose you want to watch a movie about a high-powered businesswoman / a plucky interior designer / a seamstress with big dreams and an Etsy account / an up-and-coming barista / an actress on the cusp of stardom who finds out her dad is sick / learns the family farm is in trouble / is asked to be in her sister’s wedding / is contacted by an attorney about some inherited land two weeks before Christmas / Thanksgiving / “the holiday.” She is reticent to return to her hometown in the picturesque mountains / windswept prairielands / hilly farm country so close to the holidays, but she does, and when she gets there she meets Ryan, the town handyman who knows everyone / Jake, the farmhand with an old but reliable pickup truck / Todd, a young attorney with a new legal practice who just loves this ol’ town / Will, also traveling from out of town who is handsome and rakish, a little sweet and definitely manly.

Our heroine (has had a bad experience with love / doesn’t care much for “the holidays” / has an important meeting back in New York and doesn’t have time for this), and just wants to take care of things and get back to the city. Suddenly, (a snowstorm / an illness that takes a turn for the worst / complicated legal paperwork / a canceled flight) keeps her delayed, and (no cell reception / no internet / a guilt trip from her sassy aunt / a forgotten Macbook charger and of course there are no Apple Stores in this one-horse town) stops her from working. She keeps encountering her handsome admirer, and (the town postman who looks a little like Santa / her cheeky old aunt / her precocious niece / Old Frank who owns the hardware store) thinks the two look great together. Will she (fall in love / stick around for the holiday and have dinner with her handsome new beau’s big family she hardly knows / move back to her hometown now that she knows the true meaning of love and the holidays / all of the above)? You’ll just have to watch and find out!

If you want to watch that movie, then have I got a channel for you. Everyone loves a good Hallmark movie, where there is no COVID, no inflation, no social media anxiety, and no politics (aside from old Mr. Jenkins, the town mayor with a heart of gold). Who is watching those movies? You are, even if you don’t want to admit it — and you aren’t alone. Eighty million people watch Hallmark holiday movies every year. (There are only 300 million people in the United States.) They’re so popular that Candace Cameron Bure, who is like the Orson Welles of Hallmark movies, quit Hallmark to start her own holiday movie channel.

The important thing to acknowledge about Hallmark movies is that they are pleasures not because they are bad, but because they are so good. All else proceeds from there. They are well-cast and well-acted. The stakes for the characters are low, which is comforting to all of us. The outcome is always positive. More comfort yet. We are, all of us, in some way panicked and lonely and uncertain, subject to relentlessly depressingly news in a world spiraling out of control, and any kind of comfort we can get is a valid comfort.

Strangely, I have never spoken to somebody about Hallmark movies who didn’t describe them as a “guilty pleasure,” but what a mistake that is! Given the choice between, well, everything going on everywhere, it seems, and a movie where a plucky travel agent falls in love with the goodnatured ranch hand, well I know which one I’d choose.

Once Hallmark figured out the formula, everyone decided to get in on the action. Lifetime, which was once known for more intense fare, featuring couples and even entire families no one would describe as wholesome (they had way more revenge killings than Hallmark movies, anyway), is now Hallmark Lite. Amazon joined the fray, too (you can always tell which movie is a lighthearted, romantic holiday flick because the people look happy). Netflix? The final few subscribers to it report to me that Hallmarktype movies are standard fare when the holiday season sets in. So ubiquitous is the Hallmark movie that it has transcended its channel of origin and the company that produces them. (I’m just going to call them all “Hallmark movies” here — you know exactly what I am talking about.)

Hallmark movies deliver Christmas. You don’t even have to be Christian to buy into the ideal. White snow piled shoulder high, blanketing every inch of real estate. Carols and cookies and guileless love and good intentions. The shows sustain something inside us all that is woefully malnourished. And they aren’t the first bit of media to do so.

The modern Christmas that we celebrate is in large measure an invention of Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol is more than a great story about Muppets — so influential was the book that it popularized everything from the phrase “Merry Christmas” to the big family meal we have to celebrate the holiday. It is almost impossible to overstate how

directly instrumental that book was on culture 179 years ago, and your family Christmas gathering today. That’s a pretty good run for any book’s sway. The Christmas invented by Dickens feels right, somehow. A warm, comforting way to celebrate something in a cold, unforgiving world, and a vital message that says, “You can change and this can be your life.” Yes, when you read the book or watch the zillion different movies of it, you are Scrooge.

On some level, Hallmark movies are the apotheosis of the Dickens holiday ideal, but on a deeper level, they are shaping our own perceptions of the holiday season, and what it should be. (Hallmark as a brand has been no slouch, either. You may not believe this, but Hallmark invented modern wrapping paper!) The movies provide an escape from literally every institutional, economic, and political problem in the world. It always snows on cue, the people in your everyday life are pulling for you, working for your happy ending. Houses still have white picket fences! We want to live in that world, and it feels so possible, it’s right there, just out of reach.

The main character has a problem — but not too awful a problem. Home is more than a house, but rather, is a community. (I mean how many people know the name of their mail carrier in real life?) She has an interesting job. Her hometown never looks the way we’ve allowed our towns to look — endless stretches of stoplights, gas stations, fast food, and national chain stores. She’ll never get to her car and find the driverside window has been smashed in and the glovebox rifled through, and wonder how she is going to pay the rent and repair the window. If she is single, she’ll find an effortless love (though not too effortless — there must be tension). (But not too much tension!)

The world we have created looks a lot more like the old Lifetime movies than the new. If for no other reason, it is good to have a touchstone. Something to work toward.

Hallmark has been in the television business since the 1950s. In 2001, the company bought a religious channel, Odyssey, and over the next decade, its schedule started looking a lot less like generic lifestyle and family programming and a lot more like a Thomas Kincade painting. By the mid-2010s, Hallmark went all-in on Christmas programming. It was, to put it mildly, a success. Eighty million viewers is a mind-blowing number.

Hallmark also has the “Movies and Mysteries” channel, whose fare is best described as wall-to-wall cozy mysteries, where somebody always gets murdered, but nobody ever gets hurt. The heroines sip tea, knit, and get the dastardly coward who killed the beloved neighbor or stole the valuable family heirloom. It’s Scooby-Doo for serious folks — but not too serious!

And if we love Hallmark movies, Hallmark movies love us right back. Quite a few of them are filmed in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. These are lots of local jobs, lots of big business. The movies are made in about two weeks, and Hallmark alone pumps out a few dozen a year. It takes a lot of solid technical talent to make movies at that pace with that level of quality. These are absolute pros on set.

And their stars have probably been behind you in the Rouses checkout line, and you didn’t even notice. They film here for good reason — we’ve got it all! If Louisiana is good enough for Chris Pratt or Anna Kendrick, it’s good enough for that sort of famous actress who was in that TV show a few years ago I think. A day’s drive down I-10 (with a detour on 55) and you’ll basically be in half the holidays movies you’ve seen where Becky from the big city has to make peace with her estranged brother just in time to light the tree in the town square. To name only a few:

Earlier this year, shooting started on Family Christmas, which is the perfect distillation of every Hallmark movie title. It is being filmed in Sorrento, in Ascension Parish, and is easily the biggest thing to happen in Sorrento since John “Hot Rod” Williams (a Sorrento native) played for the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA in the 1980s and 90s.

In 2019, the Lifetime Original Movie A Christmas Wish was filmed in Ponchatoula, and saw Faith, the main character, make a Christmas wish to experience true love for the first time. When she meets Andrew the next day, it seems Christmas has delivered. But is her true love Andrew? Or is it her best friend Wyatt, who was there all along?

Meanwhile, Lifetime also filmed Christmas in Louisiana in New Iberia. In it, a big city lawyer goes back to her hometown to celebrate an annual Christmas festival, and while there, falls in love with Christmas — and an old flame — all over again.

Hard as it might be to believe, Christmas in Louisiana was not a sequel to 2017’s Christmas in Mississippi, in which Holly, a big city photographer, returns to her hometown of Gulfport to help celebrate an annual Christmas festival, and while there, falls in love with Christmas — and an old flame — all over again.

Lafayette got some love in 2018 with The Christmas Contract, in which Jolie, a big city web designer, goes back to her hometown, where her parents run an annual Christmas Market. While there, she falls in love with her best friend’s brother.

That very same year in that very same Lafayette, on Amazon Prime Video, Hometown Christmas sees Noelle, a big city doctor, returning to her hometown to help resurrect an annual Christmas festival. While there, she falls in love with an old flame.

It would be hard to overstate how huge 2018 was for Lafayette. In Christmas Cupid's Arrow, a college professor signs up for a dating app and meets a charming attorney named Josh. (Quite an outlandish plot for this kind of movie, but it’s a Prime Video production, which is like the Rose-Art crayons of Hallmark movies.)

I think Hallmark movies have more than one bit of magic working for them. The real holiday miracle is that these movies are filmed in Louisiana during the summer, and nobody looks like they are in 80% humidity. If that’s not a holiday miracle, I don’t know what is.

It might seem like I am making fun of these movies and the cookie-cutter plots, but I am not. I celebrate them with the absurd exuberance that our hero’s hometown celebrates Christmas. These plots are a comforting escape from the everyday battles of modernity. Somehow, there is always that pillowy snow. The towns tend to be generic (though not you, Lafayette, nor you Ponchatoula!) but exemplars of the world we want. One problem the network ran into a few years ago is that there are only so many cute little towns out there. Thankfully, the Rouses readership lives in so many of them.

And if there isn’t enough time for all the holiday magic, Hallmark has found a way to deliver the same idealized world in slightly different forms. The channel has branched way beyond December (though that’s when it matters most, I believe). There’s Valentine’s Day, Spring into Love, June Weddings, and Fall Harvest, among others. Maybe — just maybe — the world we want is doable year-round.

Ultimately, after all, the Hallmark holiday movie is a genre all its own (even if it is not on Hallmark, or isn’t restricted to Christmas). Each appeals to us with a pretty straightforward message: What if things weren’t so bad? What if we were a little nicer to each other? Worthier questions are hard to find. Delivered with a high level of artistry and oftentimes filmed locally — watch those movies with joy in your heart, and tell your friends. A guilty pleasure that is not.