I watch a variety of Hallmark Channel programming across the holidays. With the entire choices out there on Netflix, Max, Hulu, and others, this seems like a really throwback transfer. Still, yearly, the channel’s Countdown to Christmas is unmissable. This is why, regardless of probably not having an enormous presence within the streaming wars, the community—sure, the community—wins them.
For the uninitiated, Countdown to Christmas begins on the finish of October and runs via late December, constantly rolling out brand-new motion pictures during which overly flawless individuals holding mugs of heat drinks remedy largely non-consequential, very middle-class, romantic issues over the course of the vacations.
Generally, the plots revolve round somebody (continuously performed by Mean Girls alum Lacey Chabert) who leaves an enormous metropolis, goes house (or to some quaint bourg) for Christmas—typically post-breakup—meets a particular individual (normally an Xmas aficionado), and fights off falling in love. As our protagonist does, they FaceTime their pal again within the metropolis about it (the pal is commonly sassy and the town is commonly New York), after which finally find yourself staying in no matter arty-crafty place they’ve discovered themselves with the brand new love of their life.
There are different quirks, too. Sometimes, the protagonist discovers they’re a duke or duchess (A Merry Scottish Christmas); on occasion they’re one in every of three brothers who discover themselves elevating a child in a extra biblical, soft-edged reimagining of an ’80s Steve Guttenberg traditional (Three Wise Men and a Baby).
Pithy descriptors however, these motion pictures rule. Predictability is the purpose. Hallmark has constructed a model out of discovering precisely what works for a sure type of viewer and ensuring that’s all it airs. Hallmark Channel caters to those followers, Lisa Hamilton Daly, the community’s head of content material, lately informed Vulture, The exec got here to Hallmark in 2021 after three years at Netflix and located that it had rather more model identification than her earlier gig. “It’s kind of a bespoke world,” she stated.
Desire to hang around within the Hallmark world is what provides the community its benefit. While streamers like Netflix and Max have a variety of stuff, they don’t actually have a powerful identification. Max used to. Disney+, as a result of it’s the house of largely family-friendly content material, type of does. Or it has a number of identities within the type of Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, princesses. But nobody fires up Netflix once they have a particular, say, sci-fi itch they should scratch; they go to the house display screen to search out one thing they’ve heard about elsewhere, or as a result of they’re ever hopeful that Netflix’s algorithm will be capable of counsel one thing they’re into. Hallmark viewers, however, can’t select what’s going to be on once they go to the channel, however they do know precisely what they’ll be getting.