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The Hallmark Christmas Movie Formula
Did you know that the Hallmark Channel shows Christmas-themed movies at this time of year? Dozens, perhaps hundreds, maybe even thousands of them. Christmas movie after Christmas movie after Christmas movie. And my wife wants to watch them all.
If you’re missed the first few hundred, let me catch you up…
We always have a heroine, a woman with a very important job to do. Someone may ask her if she has a special someone in her life, but of course she doesn’t – she is much too busy for that kind of thing. Her job is her life.
Then there’s a man; she will meet this man twice. The first time will be outside of her work responsibilities, and they will dislike each other immediately and part with disgust. Then she will meet him again, as part of her work, and will discover to her horror that she needs him in some way. They must continue to see each other whether they want to or not.
Someone will have a child. It might be hers from an earlier marriage, it might be her niece, it might be the man’s child. But this child will want nothing more than something special for Christmas, although it will look like getting this is just not going to be possible.
Probably there will be an older person. Someone whose age allows them to see beyond the troubles of the day to the things that really matter. Someone to dispense wisdom and give hope to the child when the woman and the man seem to be too busy to pay attention.
There might be one ethnic person tossed in for good measure.
Then, wonder of wonders, the project that has forced the man and woman together will cause them to see that they actually are attracted to each other. There will be chaste kissing. This will make the child happy and also, unpredictably, lead to the child’s wish coming true. The old person will nod approvingly and there will be a group hug as the snow begins to fall and jingle bells ring.
There you go — you can turn Hallmark on at any time day or night and pick up where you are in the story in minutes. When one ends, another will start right up. I might as well take my place next to my wife and watch the next one. That’s what Christmas is all about.
Published in Entertainment
Hilarious — and spot on.
I get maybe 30 minutes, max, of TV time with my wife. Hallmark has an ad showing “Countdown to Christmas.” My wife turns to me, with that warm glow of ineffable delight that need not be explained. I think, “I’m so… compromised.”
Yet, she so loves them, that I know I get husband points for watching them with her.
Thank goodness there are 3 TBs of memory on the dvr. The wife has so many recorded that if watched every one until next season, she wouldn’t finish to start over again. Can always tell it’s Chickflix by the music.
OK, I’m amazed that no one has commented on the binding common denominator to the this formulaic cash cow.
Producer: Larry Levinson
Yes, my wife is on this stuff too. That name shows up in the credits of a huge number of the Hallmark holiday and non-holiday formula movies. I know practically nothing about the guy except that he’s making a lot of money for his investors because his costs are so low.
Think back, viewers of this stuff, ever seen fake snow sprayed over shrubs that still had green leaves on them? Not hard to find. In the cold weather scenes the female love interest never has outer wear like all the other actors do. No hat (would mess up hair), no winter coat (she’d look bulky), always has a DDS (decoratively draped scarf) and cute boots. Sometimes her absence of proper insulation is addressed, “I’m cold, could we get some coffee at the outrageously folksy cafe where the wait staff is always compassionate, pithy and already knows what’s best for me?” Sometimes they just ignore the fact that there’s 18″ of snow (for the snowmen or snowball fight the next day) and everyone is wearing parkas except The Svelte and Single One for whom a sweater and a quilted insulated vest will do.
Do these impede the core audience’s love of the movie? Never.
And BTW, you need not the Hallmark channels, nor even the hint of crisp air anywhere in the Northern hemisphere. These babies are all over youtube and the beauty is you can’t get the core viewer to turn one down because they’ve already seen it. Do I need to say it? If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. They’re formula-based and the core audience likes it that way.
That’s the guy!! He was in the credits of the end snippet I saw last night!
Or maybe it was the one that started after.
Or both . . .
Which makes me wonder what a Hallmark Christmas movie would look like if it were produced by @roblong.
A Christmas movie with a laugh track?
“Turn it off!!! Turn it oooofff!!!“
By the way, last year we had our very own Christmas Special here on Ricochet….
This morning I attended my weekly appointment at the Wound Clinic (yes I’m old and have an ulcer on my leg that won’t heal). The waiting room is always full and the small TV is usually tuned to Golden Girls. Guess what was on this morning! A Hallmark Christmas movie! I’ve seen every GG episode at least 6 times so this was a welcome change. I didn’t even retreat to my book or look for recipes in the magazines.
So Matt, do you write at the WSJ under a pseudonym? Or is this a case of Richochet being read in the relative halls of power as it came out 1 day after this post….
Time for Matt to update his avatar:
Matt and/or John
Well, some lead, some follow.
Soon, you’ll have started your own formula for criticism that’s just endlessly rehashed!
More commentary along similar lines:
“The protagonist: Young, white, pretty but not beautiful, in her late 20s or early 30s. She is successful, an ambitious professional woman who has moved away from the small town she was raised in to make her way in the big city. Never married, she has had men in her life, but never the right one. She is often played by a familiar actress, someone you recognize from television work when she was younger, the kind of performer where you say, “Oh, I know her … [snapping of fingers] … she was in [such and such].” The main problem with our protagonist is that she is successful, but unhappy — and she doesn’t know it. She desperately needs a return to her roots.
“The setting: The main character must find herself in small-town America, a place with a Northern climate and a good chance of snow. Think Idaho or Ohio. The snow is magical. No paralyzing blizzards. The snowflakes must be as big as cornflakes, big enough to cover the ground for sledding and to cover the landscape for beauty. This snow floats from sky to ground even when the sun is shining. Since this movie is set at Christmas time, the town must have an appropriate name: Evergreen, Joyville, Holly Park, Pine Village, Snowbound.
“Minor characters: We need a love interest, a man who may not attract her at first; maybe he is already engaged, or she knew him back in the day and nothing clicked. To form a triangle, there must be another woman, beautiful, entitled — but not entitled to him. A child is optional, but desirable, but not more than one, please. We need a wisdom figure with Santa-like qualities. Finally, to form another triangle of sorts we need another man — boyfriend, boss — who represents a gravitational force back to the big city and away from small-town values.”
https://www.poynter.org/news/what-i-learned-about-writing-watching-hallmark-christmas-movies
Glad more of this needful research is being done. But help me avoid the article–what was there to learn from watching this stuff?
Pardon me please, to those I will no doubt offend: nothing is learned at all. This is the purest form of amusement (etymological root alert – from the Greek meaning “not thinking” ). It is watched because they enjoy doing so. The whole point/attraction of such a formula work is that nothing new of substance will be introduced. In the first 10 minutes, the viewer will figure out which character will do what, and the only unknowns-to-come will indeed support the formula, not create a variation on the theme.
They are watched because of the process the viewer is taken through. No new POV, no wrinkle shedding new light on a familiar topic, very little personal chemistry brought to the screen. A holiday/romance experience.
Real life nearly always has unpleasantries to deal with. Not so here; even the worst moments of the leading character’s crisis are not bad because you know how it will end. Think of daytime TV dramas on the air for decades. Or classic tales retold for generations.
You’ve got the etymology wrong.
I’ll cop to that. Didn’t do the research. I hereby request you drop the parenthetic remark.
My thesis nonetheless holds. Unlike the movie producers who strive to make something different, provocative, a story that makes a point, the formula movies are made to take the viewer on an unsurprising journey.
The point is the experience. Relive facets of a familiar holiday celebration. Watch a rather unencumbered romance unfold. Action, fear, tension, mystery, comedy, inequity and poignance are not here in significant doses.
Just trying to answer your question.
I’m for formula, which we used to call genre, or what have you.
You know how every Shakespeare comedy & Jane Austen novel is going to end.
Most genre stuff is of no comparable insight, but it can still amuse people who have the predisposition. I see nothing wrong with it, unless it threatens to engulf or overwhelm the culture. This Christmas stuff doesn’t.
There’s stuff to learn there, but only for people who have some respect for & curiosity about the gentle passions that lead people to these stories, & what they say about a society.
I’m doing a bit of writing on old Christmas movies. They weren’t great, most of them. But the ones that are famous are usually insightful, most of them, on purpose.
Protestant Christmas stories tend to be rural or suburban; lots of going to Grandma and Grandpa’s big home on a farm, and a great big dinner where everyone says grace at a table with wooden napkin rings. The Christmas tree is chopped down the night before, or morning of Christmas and decorated traditionally. The country is regarded as God’s country (I doubt Romania is much different in that regard), full of honest people with fresh air in their lungs, ready to straighten out city people and their silly problems.
Catholic Christmases are usually urban, frequently involving getting a baseball mitt for Joey, whose older brother got sent up to the Chair for knocking off a liquor store owner during a holdup. The “hoodlum” priests who specialize in righting wrongs are also crafty matchmakers who manage to point couples towards the altar. Sometimes the whole neighborhood mafia will kick in and buy a new boxing ring for the boy’s club.
Yup, & this independence v. equality is straight out of Tocqueville!
Very well put, Gary!
Not equality, Titus, but charity and grit. Urban people can be 0lenty independent.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Hallmark Christmas movie. For how long have they been making them?
AFAIK, about 25 years, but long before there was a Hallmark Channel there were annual Hallmark specials on broadcast TV during the Christmas holidays and before Valentine’s Day.
I think his point was that it’s easy to be cynical about these fluffy, formula movies, but learning to enjoy them helped him to stop being so cynical, that’s a good thing.
Amuse:
Just because that was an interesting thought. I tend to agree, that formulaic entertainment has a place on TV – look at your average police procedural/legal drama … the formula hasn’t changed much since LA Law, and Alley McBeal re-defined these as soapy comedies. Even “Castle” – one of my favorite detective shows in recent years – went to great pains to keep the formula intact, they also added soapy comedy and emotional elements. Which turned what could have been a very average police procedural into a reformulation of the genre.
I remember those, and I think that library became the seedling for the Hallmark channel. How they had programing to build their early seasonal marathons. Are the Hallmark movies really that different than the Christmas movies that get turned out year after year? The Santa Clause, Elf, other than having a female led?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these, but from the evocative coverage here (and elsewhere), and a general knowledge of the culture, I think I can tell exactly what they are.
What intrigues me (and here I obviously spin off into entirely unsupported fancy i.e. criticism) is that all of these movies have genuine screenwriters. This distinguishes them from so much ‘A’-list Hollywood product, which seems to have dispensed with this part of the ‘creative’ process in favour of SFX, CGI or NDAs.
Special effects, computer generated imagery, or non-disclosure agreements?
Exactly. (: