![]() While Hallmark routinely places in the top 20 and even the top 10 among cable channels in its key demographics (women 25 to 54 and women 18 to 49) during the rest of the year, it immediately vaulted into first place in November, a position it should maintain throughout December. The obvious answer to why Christmas completely dominates Hallmark’s winter programming lineup (and that of its sister channel, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries) is that it makes the channel money. Hallmark’s two networks made 37 original Christmas movies in 2018 - and more than 80 million people will watch them Brandon Routh, Kimberly Sustad, and a cat star in The Nine Lives of Christmas, which is UNDOUBTEDLY THE BEST Hallmark Christmas movie. Of course, Hallmark movies are also a major, major economic engine for a cable channel you probably don’t think about that often - albeit one with an intriguing, unique way of thinking about programming the TV year that has paid it back many times over. And when these movies are done well, their most fervent fans are right there, ready to embrace that snow globe themselves. Except, where the Twilight Zone traveler eventually realizes the error of his or her ways, a Hallmark protagonist comes to love living in the bubble - or the snow globe, if you will. Hallmark Christmas movies feel nostalgic for something half-understood, like those episodes of The Twilight Zone where somebody travels back to the 1890s or the 1910s in hopes of chasing some America that has been lost to the mists of time. “People love their Christmas movies!” Hallmark mainstay Kellie Martin (who’s only starred in one of the channel’s Christmas movies) told me during a podcast we recorded in 2017. Nobody so much as swears, and true love is always just around the corner, even for those who may seem like lost causes. They are always, unabashedly themselves, unashamed of coming off as square, corny, old-fashioned. ![]() I’ll watch just about any Hallmark Christmas movie I stumble upon, but my favorite, 2014’s Nine Lives of Christmas, involves a fireman played by Brandon Routh who finds love at Christmas because he adopts a cat who befriends another cat, and the other cat just so happens to belong to the woman our hero is meant to be with.Ĭhristmas and cats represent a pretty perfect Venn diagram intersection of my interests, to be sure, but Nine Lives also underlines why the best Hallmark Christmas movies work. I should admit up front that I love a good Hallmark Christmas movie. They’re apolitical in a way that people who blanch at the idea that all art is political call apolitical. They embrace ideas of tradition and family, but only in the vaguest sense. ![]() The standard line about Hallmark’s endless parade of made-for-TV Christmas movies is that they’re dumb and super cheesy, but they give your grandmother something to watch. If, in Narnia, it was always winter but never Christmas, then on the Hallmark Channel, it’s always winter and always Christmas (at least between the months of October and January). ![]() Where there is always snow on the ground, where togetherness is the word to live by, where the horrors of the world reliably subside amid the flurries of a beautiful snowstorm. There is a place where it’s always Christmas.
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