There’s a shocking monologue early in one of Hallmark’s new holiday films. “I don’t have a tree. I don’t make freshly baked cookies. I’m not a wife or a mother,” declares Brooke D’Orsay, heroine of Following Yonder Star, which airs on December 15. D’Orsay stars as Abby, an actor who’s eager to shed the idealized Hallmark-esque character she’s known for playing.
Her very meta speech is antithetical to everything that Hallmark has come to represent in pop culture: heteronormative ideals, tradwife-esque domesticity, and a blinding commitment to all things Christmas. Parodies of the network abound, like a running gag about a fictional Hallmark film starring Danica McKellar in Knives Out, or storyline about the “Hallhark” Christmas universe in Bros, which featured company man Luke Macfarlane. This year, Jimmy Fallon even wrote a tongue-in-cheek jingle titled “Hallmark Movie.”
“We’re the butt of a lot of jokes. We play with them sometimes. I laugh as much as anybody,” Hallmark executive vice president of programming Lisa Hamilton Daly tells Vanity Fair. “That James Franco skit on SNL is still one of the funniest things ever…. I don’t get too anxious because, for the most part, it feels loving.”
It’s easy to laugh when you’re on top. Hallmark heads into the 15th anniversary of its Countdown to Christmas programming as the most-watched cable entertainment network of 2023. The channel reigned supreme with women over 18 in the final months of the year, as it has for the last decade. Nielsen reported in 2021 that over 80 million people had tuned into a Hallmark movie during that holiday season. Vulture subsequently deemed Hallmark “TV’s last great basic-cable channel.” Earlier this year, Emmy-winning Abbott Elementary creator Quinta Brunson shared her dream of ghostwriting a Hallmark Christmas film. “People are joking,” says Daly, “but they’re watching.”
When Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas launched in 2009, it featured a mere four holiday films. By 2011, the network and its sister channel, Hallmark Movie and Mysteries, were airing dozens of Christmas movies nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, beginning in late October. This year, the lineup has snowballed to a staggering 47 films—setting the pace for an entire ecosystem of holiday fare at Lifetime, Netflix, and beyond.
The cozy predictability of Hallmark movies is integral to their success. Still, the network has recently begun toying with certain tropes in its modestly budgeted, expediently filmed films. “When people say there’s a formula, I feel like they’re not referring to the last four or five years,” says Julie Sherman Wolfe, who has written two dozen Hallmark titles over the last decade. These days, for instance, there’s (slightly) less emphasis on romance; last year’s A Merry Scottish Christmas reunited Hallmark’s foremost star Lacey Chabert with her Party of Five costar Scott Wolf for a sibling-centered story. That season also brought the This Is Us–coded Christmas on Cherry Lane, about interconnected people living at the same address decades apart.
