There is a shocking monologue at the beginning of one of these Hallmark’s new holiday movie. “I don’t have a tree. I don’t make fresh baked cookies. I am not a wife or a mother,” declared Brooke D’Orsay, heroine of Follow that distant star, airs December 15. D’Orsay plays Abby, an actress who wishes to portray the ideal Hallmark-esque character she is famous for playing.
Her very meta speech contradicts everything Hallmark represents in pop culture: heteronormative ideals, housewife style family and blind commitment to all things Christmas. There are many parodies online, such as a joke about a fictional Hallmark movie starring Danica McKellar IN knife out, or the plot of the “Hallhark” Christmas universe in Hey guys, including the company man Luke Macfarlane. This year, Jimmy Fallon even wrote a satirical sentence titled “Hallmark Movie.”
“We were the butt of a lot of jokes. Sometimes we play with them. I laugh as much as anyone,” Hallmark executive vice president of programming Lisa Hamilton Daly tell Vanity fair. “That thing James Franco short play SNL still one of the funniest things ever…. I’m not too worried because for the most part it feels lovely.”
It’s easy to laugh when you’re on top. Hallmark heads to the 15th anniversary of Countdown to Christmas as most watched cable entertainment network of 2023. The channel dominates women over 18 in the final months of the year, just as it has in the past decade. Nielsen reported in 2021, more than 80 million people watched the Hallmark movie during that holiday season. Vulture later deemed Hallmark “TV’s last great basic cable channel.” Earlier this year, Emmy winner Abbott Elementary School creator Quinta Brunson shared Her dream is to write the script for a Hallmark Christmas movie. “People are joking,” Daly said, “but they are watching.”
When Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas debuted in 2009, it featured just four holiday movies. By 2011, the network and its sister channel, Hallmark Movies and Mysteries, were airing dozens of Christmas movies nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, starting in late October. This year, the list filmography has skyrocketed to a staggering 47 movies — setting the pace for the entire holiday movie ecosystem at Lifetime, Netflix and beyond.
The cozy predictability of Hallmark movies is an indispensable part of their success. However, the network has recently begun toying with certain tropes in movies shot on modest, reasonable budgets. “When people talk there is a formulaI feel like they didn’t mention the last four or five years,” said Julie Sherman Wolfe, who has written more than two dozen Hallmark titles in the past decade. For example, today there is less emphasis on romance; last year Merry Scottish Christmas Reuniting Hallmark’s top stars Lacey Chabert with her Party of five co-star Scott Wolf for a sibling-centric story. That season also brought This is us–encryption Christmas on Cherry Lane, about interconnected people living at the same address decades apart.
