“He’s got those Hallmark handyman vibes,” one character says of Chad Michael Murray’s strapping contractor-turned-stripper in Netflix’s The Merry Gentlemen, now streaming. His taste for plaid button-downs and belief that “city girls are all the same” aside, Murray’s leading man gets far steamier than a similar character ever could on Netflix’s prime holiday TV movie rival. The Merry Gentlemen is about a shirtless, all-male dance revue saving a small-town music venue. And it’s not even the most absurd Christmas movie about scantily-clad men to debut on the platform this month.
Just last week, Hot Frosty—Lacey Chabert’s first movie with Netflix after making more than 40 Christmas titles at Hallmark—dared to ask: What would happen if an inexplicably chiseled snowman turned into an equally ripped real man, thanks to the power of a magical Christmas scarf? Since premiering November 13, Hot Frosty has remained the number one movie on Netflix, warming even the coldest of critics’ hearts and spawning a robust discourse over on Letterboxd—thanks, in part, to its naughtier-than-usual storyline.
Hot Frosty is whatever you want it to be. It’s a biblical allegory—Dustin Milligan’s aptly-named Jack is resurrected, then becomes a carpenter. It’s a commentary on the criminal justice system—Brooklyn Nine-Nine alumni Craig Robinson and Joe Lo Truglio go to terrifying lengths to imprison the snowman for streaking through the town square. It’s even an homage to Pretty Woman, mainly in a shopping scene where poor Jack finally gets some clothes. What it isn’t is all that risqué, apart from some artfully-staged nudity and innuendo from a horny neighbor played by Lauren Holly.
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This is largely a relief, as Jack is pretty new to the whole being-a-human thing. If Narnia’s Mr. Tumnus and 30 Rock’s Sexy Baby had a love child, it would be Jack—a naif who repairs the house of Chabert’s widowed character Kathy, then fixes her broken heart. In turn, she acts as Jack’s guide to the human world, explaining concepts as rudimentary as ovens (they’re hot!) and complex as cancer.
While it’s being sold as a Magic Mike-esque take on the holiday season, there is similarly far more sugar than spice to be found in The Merry Gentlemen. The gyrating townsfolk appear in what’s a relatively paint-by-numbers holiday rom-com, albeit one where Murray flashes a pair of “Naughty Elf” boxer briefs and Grease 2’s Maxwell Caulfield strip down to his skivvies. “Hey, I’ve been shaking my booty since you’ve been alive, kid,” he tells another dancer with gusto.
Netflix officially entered the holiday movie arms race in 2017, with the utterly vanilla The Christmas Prince—a film that lives eternally through clips that have since been tucked into other Netflix original holiday movies. It entered slightly spicier territory with 2020’s Holidate, which found raunchy fun in two singles using each other as plus-ones for their various holiday commitments. The following year, Netflix took another leap when Brooke Shields and Cary Elwes hooked up mid-movie in A Castle for Christmas. Single All the Way, released the same season, was more chaste, but marked the first of Netflix’s seasonal offerings to focus on a gay love story—a year after Lifetime made a queer-themed holiday movie, and a year before Hallmark did the same.
