Millions defy 2017’s bad news, turn to Hallmark
New ‘Countdown to Christmas’ underway
Consider the Hallmark Channel in December.
No, but really.
“I cannot stop watching the Hallmark Channel,” says Mac Cohn, proprietor of a sports website in Ohio. “Usually, to unwind, I would watch football, but even watching football has become a political thing. The Hallmark Channel has none of that.”
Hallmark, which often seemed to exist just so you had something to fold laundry to, is now deep into its biggest annual event — “Countdown to Christmas,” a series of several dozen made-for-TV movies. And it is an event.
“The Christmas Train” — with a plot that is vaguely “Murder on the Orient Express,” if one replaces “murder” with “festive spirit” — reached 4.9 million viewers when it aired the Saturday after Thanksgiving weekend, the most-watched cable program in the country that day. Meanwhile, the actual “Murder on the Orient Express,” a feature film starring two Oscar winners and several nominees, recently made $10.7 million on its opening day in theaters. Impressive — but divide by roughly $10 a movie ticket, and that means there were five times more people watching Kimberly Williams-Paisley and Dermot Mulroney on Hallmark than multiplex-goers watching Johnny Depp and Dame Judi Dench.
“The Hallmark movie that is my favorite is ‘A Christmas to Remember,’” Cohn continues. “It’s a TV personality — I believe she has a cooking show? — and she needed to get away for the holidays, and she ended up wrecking her car in a snowbank, and she got amnesia. Have you seen it?”
Yep.
We have seen “A Christmas to Remember.” We have seen “The Sweetest Christmas.” We have seen “Marry Me at Christmas.” We have watched Hallmark movies in which the tax-friendly Vancouver area doubles as a festive Chicago, a festive Georgia, a festive Maine inn, a festive Vermont inn. We have watched Lacey Chabert as an aspiring clothing designer and then as a different aspiring clothing designer, and then as an overlooked baker, and then as an overworked office drone, and it snowed every time at the end. Every single time.
We would typically be the first person to mock the idea of the Hallmark Channel, but there is something specific about this December: It’s crap. The news stinks, current events stink — turning on the television, in general, stinks.
Another beloved icon revealed to be a sexual predator? Nope — let’s watch Hallmark.
Another North Korean missile, now deemed capable of hitting the United States? Nope — Hallmark.
The president is retweeting fake video clips of — NOPE, LA LA LA LA. HALLMARK. HALLMARK. HALLMARK.
“It’s like, Hallmark or Prozac?” offers Julie Miner, an adjunct professor of public health at George Mason University and one of the many people who are watching a truckload of Hallmark this season. “Like, I don’t want to take anti-depressants, but at this point in 2017, it’s that or it’s Hallmark.”
“About 10 years ago, we were making Christmas movies, but we weren’t doing it as part of an overall event,” says Michelle Vicary, Hallmark’s executive vice president of programming. “But what the ratings told us, and what our audience told us, is that they wanted more.”
So now the Hallmark Channel — and its sister channel, Hallmark Movies and Mysteries — has released, in 2017 alone: “Thirty-three movies,” Vicary says.
Thirty-three movies. They work on them yearround, each put together quickly, with a modest budget of a few million dollars, and then they debut a new one almost every night in December.
They are always Christmas-focused, but tend to celebrate the season rather than Jesus Christ. They are often about a high-powered career woman who needs to slow down. She is played by someone from that show you used to watch circa 1992-98. She will meet a moderately attractive man who looks like an Old Spice commercial. The plot might be reminiscent of a specific big-budget feature film, except smaller budget, and with Christmas.
“The thing is,” says Cohn: “I really don’t know what I’m going to do when December is over.”