Lindsay Lohan, star of The Parent Trap and Mean Girls, is now building a midlife holiday empire at Netflix, including Our Little Secret.
One December morning, a millennial critic awoke to discover that she had been begrudgingly charmed by an onslaught of Hallmark and Netflix holiday films.
When I first discovered the existence of made-for-television Christmas movies, maybe 15 years ago, they struck me as sentimental and anti-feminist. Also, they seemed to be made for older people. The leads were always floundering in midlife until their romantic and professional lives were reformed through the magic of Christmas. Then, one December morning, I awoke to find that I had transformed into the target demographic. I am older now, and the movies are made just for me.
The crop of Christmas movies released this year – made most prominently by Hallmark, though increasingly rivalled by Netflix’s holiday machine – are sprinkled with millennial bait. They feature weathered stars from nostalgic childhood properties and crib plots and vibes from touchstone films. They have anticipated my critiques, modulating the melodrama with self-conscious winks and dialling up the sexual innuendo.
Romantic comedies are about one party lowering her defences and another raising his game until they finally meet on level ground. That’s what’s happened here: The bad Christmas movies grew more cynical, and I grew softer. As I neared the end of Our Little Secret, a Netflix Christmas movie starring Lindsay Lohan, I actually cried.
What’s happening to me? In recent years, my feelings about work, romantic love, big-city living, small-town charm and secular holiday cheer have not appreciably changed. It’s my relationship to rote sentimentality that has shifted. Recently, I have felt so pummeled by stress and responsibility that I have found it difficult to turn on a compelling new television show at the end of the day. I have no extra energy to expend familiarising myself with unknown characters, deciphering twists or even absorbing scenes of visual interest.
What I’ve been looking for, instead, is a totally uncompelling new television show – one that expects nothing from me, and that gives me little in return. The bad Christmas movie’s beats are so consistent, its twists so predictable, its actors and props so loyally reused, it’s easy to relax drowsily into its rhythms. The genre is formulaic, which makes for a kind of tradition. Now, it plays through the winter like a crackling fireplace in my living room.
The road map for the modern TV Christmas movie was charted by the Hallmark Channel in the early 2000s. In the past couple of decades, it has built out a whole cinematic universe where life is as complicated as a greeting card. Its hundreds of films cycle through a blissfully limited set of plots and tropes: the protagonist will be a pastry chef, or a gift-wrap shop owner, or a candy-cane company CEO. She will acquire an Alaskan inn, or she will inherit a Scottish castle, or her flight will be diverted to a Christmas-themed town.
She will meet a recent widower, or a handsome woodworker, or a charming earl. His home will be aggressively bedecked with Christmas lights and decorative bowls of frosted pine cones. He will wear a scarf. He will wear another scarf. At one point, he will gift the protagonist a seasonally appropriate necklace.
Together they will be forced to put on a Strudelfest or locate a missing antique nutcracker. In the end, she will abandon her professional ambitions in order to join him in his small town, or (in a more recent plot reversal) he will forgo his small-town life to join her in the big city. It will snow, and they will kiss.
Everything about the modern Christmas movie is so relentlessly familiar.
Even the stars I don’t recognise look somehow inherently recognisable, as if they are all fitted with squinting approximations of famous faces. I’ve found myself charmed by their commitment to the bit: this fleet of working actors who dutifully report to fake Christmas after fake Christmas, modelling festive knits and straight faces as they reenact this holiday pageant again and again.
It’s almost impressive how Hallmark Channel and its competitors have churned out hundreds of movies that are nominally unique but still near identical, although one wonders how long it can go on.
Hallmark now has a line of films under the “Time to Come Home for Christmas” banner, with Blake Shelton attached as an executive producer (and based on his Christmas song Time for Me to Come Home). Titles include Time for Him to Come Home for Christmas, Time for Her to Come Home for Christmas, Time for Me to Come Home for Christmas, Time for Us to Come Home for Christmas and Time for Them to Come Home for Christmas.
Enter Netflix, which has revived the genre with an algorithmic jolt. Since it waded into the category with The Princess Switch in 2018 (basically The Prince and the Pauper but make it Christmas), it has produced a number of original holiday movies, many of which crib elements from hit mainstream films. Now this familiar genre is infused with yet more familiar content, tuned to the memories stored by millennial brains. Hot Frosty is Encino Man but make it Christmas. The Merry Gentlemen is Magic Mike but make it Christmas.
And the Hallmark Channel is working from the same playbook: It has recently debuted Christmas in Notting Hill (Notting Hill but make it Christmas), Holiday Crashers (Wedding Crashers but make it Christmas) and the time-travel rom-com A ’90s Christmas (Hot Tub Time Machine but make it Christmas).
These newer iterations uphold the same cliches, with a few modifications. There are now bad Hanukkah movies (Hanukkah on Rye) and bad interfaith holiday movies (Double Holiday). The actors are increasingly ones I have seen before: Lohan, who became an avatar of childhood with The Parent Trap and adolescence with Mean Girls, is now building a midlife holiday empire at Netflix; this year’s offering is Our Little Secret, a comedy of errors about spending the holidays with nightmarish in-laws.
Another new Netflix film, The Merry Gentlemen, has recruited One Tree Hill heartthrob Chad Michael Murray to play a small-town carpenter who helps a city girl save her parents’ floundering local venue by starring in a spicy holiday revue; images of Murray’s abs launched a celebratory press cycle. In these new films, Christmas-themed male shirtlessness is increasingly required; in Hot Frosty, a small-town widow magically animates a chiselled snowman, and he spends the first act of the movie wearing only his scarf.
The Hot Frosty widow is played by Lacey Chabert, who has reigned for a decade as Hallmark’s Christmas queen. It’s reassuring to see her join Netflix’s lineup, bringing all of the tradition of the genre to its new form. Chabert – an alum of Party of Five and Lohan’s Mean Girls – is a pro at this. She plays a Kathy or a Kristin or a Kylie. She manoeuvres efficiently from small-town set to small-town set. Her face makes no unnecessary moves.
Although she often plays the hardened professional city woman who must rediscover the magic of Christmas through a surprise stay in a provincial town, Chabert is never that hard or that professional. She is just politely asking for the castle Wi-Fi password so she can check her email. She is frazzled, or grieving, but never cynical. Her most distinguishing feature is that she is super nice. And this makes her irresistible to improbably handsome men the world over.
With her move to Netflix for Hot Frosty, things get a little more interesting – but still just uninteresting enough to keep my interest. Chabert still gets her life lessons, and her snowflake necklace, but this time she also gets actual jokes. The premise is finally ludicrous enough to jell with the excesses of the genre.
And matching Chabert with a sentient ice sculpture is an inspired move. At last, her arrow-straight performance is paired with a suitably wacky scene partner (Dustin Milligan of Schitt’s Creek) and with a plot that justifies her subdued persona.
Once Chabert’s widow animates the snowman, he instantly imprints on her like a lost duckling. And because he learns everything he knows through watching television (including previous Netflix original Christmas movies), it’s plausible that he’d treat her exactly like a Netflix original Christmas movie hero would. Hot Frosty is not a full-blown parody of bad Christmas movies; it’s still a bad Christmas movie at heart. I won’t watch it again, but I’d watch something just like it next year.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Amanda Hess
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