Escape
The Core Tenets of Hallmark
Deck Them is a weekly newsletter exploring the Hallmark Channel’s 15th annual Countdown to Christmas. Share the joy ⭐
Mariah Carey has officially declared the beginning of the 2024 Holiday season. We are in good company. While most will continue to wait until after Thanksgiving to begin watching holiday movies, we all have that crazy aunt who already has her tree up. Here at Deck Them, we say, “If you got it, flaunt it.”
The rest of you can watch The Nightmare Before Christmas (it takes place after Halloween, dammit). We don’t care.
WHAT MORE COULD WE ASK THAN OUR OWN LITTLE SNOW GLOBE?
The core tenets of Hallmark are this: (1) Christmas in every frame and (2) a happy ending.
For leading man (and occasional screenwriter) Paul Campbell, the happy ending “is essential. There has to be eternal hope alive.” Campbell believes we “can’t underestimate the power of the happy ending and the kiss at the end,” people tune in “because they know how these things end.” His co-stars agree.
Escapism in Christmas in every frame. Each moment wrapped in sparkling light; joy eternal. A moment on screen that you can exist forever in. What if everywhere we went, it was glowing? What’s the point of these movies if you can’t stroll through a Christmas tree farm? Kiss in a gazebo? Escapism is the thing.
“The genre is a feeling,” according to Campbell, “one that can’t be articulated.”
Hallmark offers escapism with a guaranteed outcome. And maybe we need that—just for a moment, a brief reprieve.
In a sense, Hallmark enthusiasts are more adventurous than the average consumer. Whereas the viewing public will likely settle on only one or two comfort movies to get them through the year, say Julie & Julia, say Shop Around the Corner, Hallmark enthusiasts will watch forty new releases year after year with the same desired effect.
To be left watching in a winter wonderland.
A DECIDEDLY HALLMARKIAN BARGAIN
Following her dreams of performing on Broadway, an aspiring singer from Pocatello, Idaho, finds herself in the heart of New York City and at the center of an enemies-to-lovers, Cyrano de Bergerac-type love triangle with a rival waiter and his grifter economy cousin. Everyone seems to be having fun here — but while we would eat at the diner in A Carol for Two, we couldn’t sing along.
Our Holiday Story is, perhaps, the best of Hallmark’s attempts at story within a story and certainly a bellwether for the Christmas in every frame ethos of this year’s Countdown to Christmas. A loving couple shares the story of how they met when their daughter's boyfriend comes to meet them for the first time at Christmas. More notably, the film marks Nikki DeLoach’s return to Hallmark after nearly five years on Hallmark Mystery.1 She comes out swinging, manifesting, face acting heavy lifting. Warren Christie's line reads double as a suitable Rufus Humphrey. We believe they’re meant for each other. The story drifts; that’s fine. The thing about a warm blanket is that you may doze off.
Holiday Mismatch sees the highly-anticipated, highly-anticipated reunion of Beth Broderick and Caroline Rhea (both of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina fame) as two mothers who couldn’t be more different playing matchmakers for their respective children. The kids concoct a fake dating scheme that lasts as long as their first date. Their chemistry is efficient.
We remain entangled in Christmas lights of our own making.
Countdown to Christmas continues with Trivia at St. Nick’s on Friday, Santa Tell Me on Saturday, and ‘Tis the Season to Be Irish on Sunday. All times 8/7c.
Coming in hot next week Netflix will debut Hot Frosty on Wednesday, November 13, 2024. Hot Frosty is written by frequent Hallmark scribe Russel Hainline, who penned last year’s The Santa Summit (a Deck Them favorite) and had a hand in the upcoming Three Wiser Men and a Boy.
We’ll see you there, hot cocoa in hand.
DeLoach also occupied a unique subsection of 2010s popular culture, having starred in MTV’s Awkward and occasionally co-hosting The Young Turks.