Transcript of How a Skeptical Critic Came to Love Bad Christmas Movies

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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the story of how a big city culture critic, Amanda Hess, found love where she least expected it in the monotony of Hallmark's Christmas Movies. It's Tuesday, December 24th. Amanda, thank you for coming into the studio.

Thank you so much for having me.

This is your first time on the show. This is the thing we get to do at the end of the year. We get to bring on everybody who's never been on the show, but who we secretly have wanted to be on the show.

This is my Christmas wish come true.

You write about culture for the times. You're a critic. You're here today to talk about a subject that I'll be honest, I don't think I or many of us on the show ever imagined might be an episode of The Daily, you are going to be providing an exploration, a meditation, whatever you want to call it, a study of the made for TV Christmas movie, which, you contend, has not quite gotten the critical attention that it deserves. Specifically, you're going to be talking to us here about that most familiar brand of made for a TV Christmas movie, the Hallmark channel Christmas movie. That is our subject today.

Yes.

How do you justify that?

I wasn't always this way. I think I was always I was always interested in Hallmark Christmas movies on a meta level, but I was not interested in sitting down and watching them for an hour and a half.

Or talking about them on the daily.

Yeah, right. But that changed this year, and Now, I still think they're bad, but I really like watching them.

Well, before we get to how you became this person who watches these movies, I want you to describe, especially for the unacquainted, this entire universe of made-for-TV movies. Just give us a little bit of background about it.

Well, like you said, we're really talking about a category that was pioneered by the Hallmark channel and is still dominated by that channel. Hallmark produces dozens of these made-for-TV Christmas movies every year. In 2024, they released 32 of them. One can imagine that they're not putting a huge amount of production into these movies. They seem like they each have the budget for one snow flurry a movie.

One fake snowstorm. Exactly. What are the names of some of these movies? Just so we know what we're talking about here.

Let me pull up a list of them. Lucky Christmas, The Case for Christmas, A Christmas Wedding Tale. That one's about dogs. A Christmas Wish, Holiday Engagement, The Christmas Paget, Christmas magic, Christmas Song, Matchmaker Santa. It's Christmas, Carol.

It's Christmas, Carol.

Yes.

There's not a lot of variation in this titling.

No, these movies are very similar to each other.

I want to now dive into this journey that you have been on with these movies. What had been your relationship to them up until quite recently?

When I first became aware of them, I thought they were very stupid. They seemed anti-feminist to me and really sentimental.

Had you watched a lot of them?

I had seen maybe a combined five minutes of these movies, but it was enough to understand what was happening. The women always seemed to exist only to fall in love. They would throw away their entire lives as soon as they were touched by the magic Christmas.

But then, as the narrator of a movie might say, One fateful day, things change for you. Tell us that story.

A couple of months ago, I learned that someone I know who's an actor in New York appeared in a Hallmark Christmas movie. The next time I saw him, I was interrogating him about it. I was like, Did you wear a scarf? Did you wear a flannel shirt? How many costume changes did you have? What colors were you wearing? Did they use the same set for every Christmas movie and just turn it over? As I was asking him this, he said, Do you like Hallmark Christmas movies? I said, No, even though clearly I was very interested in them. I decided that this year, maybe I would actually watch a few of them. It turned out that by the time I sat down to do that, I was in this place in November where someone very close to me had a health scare, and they ended up being completely fine. But there was a week where I was waiting for test results to come back. The worst week ever? Yeah. I was so frozen as a person, and I really needed to find something to watch that was really uncomplicated and easy. I found that there was nothing easier than watching these Christmas movies.

I came out of the experience really starting to like them.

Well, just explain that. I mean, unpack for us why these movies were such a bomb for you in this vulnerable moment.

Well, so they do have this very recognizable formula, and there are some variations. But in the classic one, there's a big city woman who's in her 30s, which in these movies is like, she's getting a little long in the tooth. She needs to find love fast, but she has her career that she loves. Maryanne, why do you think it is you and I are the top female lawyers in the city? Because we never give up. I thought you were going to say because we're very powerful independent women who don't rely on anyone to do our dirty work. Even though she's a little miserable in it deep down. We're looking for unique individuals whose lifestyles are flexible and can keep up with the demand. That sounds like me in every way.

Great. What I really need to know is, how available are you?

I'm very, very available.

Even during the holidays? Yeah. What about family, partner, household pets? Are they okay with this? I'm a one-woman band. Perfect. Then I have a flight for you.

For some bizarre reason, she needs to go back to her hometown.

I don't think anybody's going to be getting through this until it dissipates. I suggest you find a place to land before you're out over the ocean.

Like she's a pilot and she's forced to do an emergency landing on Christmas Island.

Attention, this is your captain, Kate Gabriel.

Due to severe weather conditions over the Atlantic, we are making a temporary stop in Nova Scotia.

Canada? So much for our easy flight to Europe.

Or she is forced to go to Scotland for Christmas because her mother has unexpectedly inherited a castle there. 30,000. This place is 30,000 acres.

Did you know your family has 30 bathrooms?

Why does anyone need 30 bathrooms? You know, whatever it Hey, it's me. So believe it or not, I am driving down Main Street. Yep, I'm home. Listen, we have so much to catch up on. She goes to this small town, and they all look eerily similar. There's this quaint town square.

Yeah, you know.

Most people come here for the Lighthouse, but I think this street is pretty special. That's always very festively decorated for Christmas. And that is how Grandin Falls got her nickname.

Christmas towel.

There's just a random, really hot guy who she runs into, often quite literally, and they bump into each other. Watch her jump there. Thank you. He might be a handsome woodworker It's not very far.

I'm just going to walk. You didn't let me walk with you. I just have to put some tools away and lock up.

Or an unassuming groundskeeper. Who lets a ladder just standing around?

I do.

Once they go in his house, even though he's a 36 to 42-year-old single man, it's always aggressively decorated for Christmas.

Here we are. Wow.

nick, this is beautiful. It must have taken you days. And as they embark on some Christmas task together, whether it's solving the mystery of a missing specimen that will unlock a genealogical mystery for this woman's family. This is grandma's tradition.

It's an incredible gift she's given me.

Or they need to turn around a struggling music venue so that her parents can save it. Okay, I need you to declare one of these holiday IPAs as perfect. Otherwise, it might just be game over for Mobile Joe's.

Not bad, huh?

Well, now that I know the stakes, let's do this. They fall in love, but there's some impediment to their love. Usually, it has something to do with the woman having to go back to the big city. Andy, I'm leaving for Seattle in the morning. I called your mom, and I'm staying with her tonight. I think it's for the best. She has to make a big decision as to whether she's going to return to her old life in her career or she's going to start her new life, which is based in this new relationship. She goes to the airport, she gets in the car, and then-I'm going to turn the car around. She asks the driver to turn the car around. If I can figure out how to run my own practice, I can figure out how to make this work. Often, the small town man presents her with a seasonally appropriate necklace. Traditionally, you're not supposed to open Christmas presents until midnight.

Then I've never been much for tradition.

Oh, Charles. Really? There's usually a scene where he puts the necklace on, and maybe he'll adjust it on her collarbone or something, and then they fall in love.

This, of course, is a moment of physicality and a blossoming love.

Yeah, it's like the closest. It's a release. It's the closest that they're going to come to having sex in this movie, and she stays in Hallmark land forever, presumably. They kiss, and then the movie's over, so we don't really know what happens after that. Merry Christmas, Annie. Merry Christmas, Will.

I mean, these are pretty cliched plot lines. What was it about this formula that you just described that serves you so well back in November when you start watching this?

There's something really satisfying about them hitting every single one of the beats every single time over and over again for hundreds and hundreds of movies. There's very little variation, and it's like completing a paint by numbers craft I started to get really invested in predicting when the next predictable plot point was going to happen. I think at this point, if I watched a Hallmark Christmas movie and they went back to the man's house and it was not decorated for Christmas, I would be pissed. I would be like, This woman needs to get out of there because he's a psycho. She needs to leave right now. I think I just became so versed in the clichés of the world that I began to find them comforting. I didn't want anything dramatic to happen. I didn't want anything surprising to happen or stressful. I was already feeling enough of that.

You didn't want much to be demanded of you.

Yeah. I wanted everything to be firmly predictable, and it was.

I'm thinking back to what you said at the beginning of this conversation, which is that when you were not as familiar with these films and when you were not in an acute phase of being very open to them because of this medical situation happening around you, you found them to be antifeminist. If I'm reading the room correctly, you thought you were a little bit better than these movies. And yet you go through this phase where you're very open to them They are this solution to something, and you've warmed them a lot. What does that tell us, not just about these movies and their formula, but about you? What did you learn about yourself?

I think I've been beaten down enough by life at this point to be more open to sentimental things. I think when I first learned about these movies, maybe 15 years ago, my career was my identity. I was not unlike one of these hallmark heroines. Big city girl. Yeah, exactly. Now, I can see the appeal of moving to Christmastown, USA. I'm giving it all up. But also, I realized once I actually watched the movies that typically it's not that the woman just quits her job in order to do nothing and to be barefoot and pregnant with her new woodworking husband's baby. She is quitting her city job for this idealized form of work that's inherently creative and meaningful. She's running a candy cane shop or she's taking over a small town diner She's still working, but she has a job that- Is more connected to a place. A job that maybe is less and less likely to exist.

She's finding a different fulfillment than the big city media world, just to name an example. I guess in your affection for these movies, you learn that you have changed, and in the ways that you have changed, you identify more with these larger questions and perhaps even critiques of modern ambition and success.

Yeah. I definitely know now more than I did before that work is not going to love you back. I don't think that means that necessarily a small town air traffic controller is going to love you back or a small town groundskeeper is going to love you back. But I'm more open to watching a movie where that is the case. I mean, it's also true that when I first became aware of these movies, the actor seemed really old, but now I am old, and so they're usually a little bit younger than me now. I've definitely just aged into the category. We'll be right back.

This is A. O. Scott. I'm a critic at the New York Times. What I do what the other critics here do is part of the same project that all of the journalists at the New York Times work on every day to give you clarity and perspective and above all, a deeper understanding of the world. When you subscribe to the New York Times, it's not just, Here are the headlines. But here's the way everything fits together. If you'd like to subscribe, please go to nytimes. Com/subscribe. What does the critic in you make of this journey that you have been on? From skeptic and maybe even slightly disdainful skeptic to maybe not even all that grudging a fan.

Well, I think of my journey as somewhat of a romantic comedy plot, where in a rom-com, one party ups his game and one party lowers her defenses until they meet on level ground and they can have a relationship. That's what's happening here.

That's you and the Hallmark holiday movie?

I've definitely gotten softer as a person and more open to what they're selling. But they have also gotten a little bit more cynical and a little more arch, and they're selling themselves more aggressively to people like me.

Just explain that. How have they gotten a little bit more Arch, because from everything you're saying, the formula is faithful and not Arch.

Right. The formula remains the same, but there are new entrants to the category that are putting little twists on it. The big one is Netflix. Netflix is now a Christmas movie generator of its own, and its movies tend to be marketed a little bit more as comedies. There's still romances, but there's a little bit more of an emphasis on the comedy.

Remember that muscular snowman from the Snow Sculpture Festival?

And so in Hot Frosty, for example.

Which has been emblaisoned across my Netflix homepage.

Yes, it's hard to avoid. He says he doesn't remember anything before last night.

That's not good. I was a snowman. That's definitely not good.

It's a movie about a snowman who becomes a real person. How could you possibly trust me?

Because you put the scar found me.

And falls in love with Lucy Shabair. So there's the remote, the power on and off. There's a moment where Hot Frosty is learning everything about the human world by watching television. Tell her to let me out of here.

Well, miss Sweet I can even do that.

One of the things he watches is a previous Netflix Christmas movie. There is some acknowledgement of the idea that this is a category that even if people love to watch these movies, they may still like to poke a little bit of fun at them.

It's winking in itself.

Yeah. Netflix has also made their Christmas movies a little bit more risque. I got you some clothes, but you're going to have to try them on. Oh, no, not right now. Got it. Great. There's usually a shirtless man who's romping around the Christmas Wonderland for some bizarre reason. It's going to be a Christmas spectacular, full of hot up and coming men. There's a movie called The Merry Gentleman, which is basically Magic Mike meets Christmas. There's got to be a way to get people excited about this place again.

Do you think male strippers are the answer?

A bunch of local men need to put on an erotic male review in order to save a local bar that's fallen into debt.

Of course they do. A little spice on the old hallmark formula.

Yes. Oh, my God, you're naked.

Okay, first of all, my shirt was dry.

You can imagine that the cable hallmark channel audience is probably a little different than the Netflix streaming audience. It does seem like Netflix's Christmas offerings are meeting its audience where they're at a little bit more. There are more sexual situations, even if there's not a sex scene. There are more jokes. There are more actors that you might recognize from sitcom. It really does seem like Netflix is specifically seeding its movies with millennial bait, especially because the actor who now is most associated with Netflix holiday movies is Lindsay Lohan. She, I think more than anyone else, has been the avatar of millennial girlhood and then teenhood and now middle age, unfortunately, is where we are at.

Amanda, when you finished this exercise of immersing yourself in the world of these holiday movies this fall and now into this winter, you ended up writing about it in an essay that ran in the Times entitled How I Aged into the Bad Christmas Movie. What was the response to that essay?

I got a stronger response to that essay than any other piece I've ever written. Ever? Yes. When I wrote the story, because I am making a bit of fun at these movies, I was curious whether fans of them would be upset with me. It turns out that a lot of people are watching these movies in the same mode that I'm watching them.

Which is to say as a formulaic escape, as a predictable way of navigating a challenging time.

Exactly.

Is there one of these emails that stands out to you?

I'm going to find it. Okay. Dear Amanda, I watched my first Hallmark Bad Christmas movie that super cold Sunday the other week. While I meant to do some things around the house as I was not venturing outside. I saw our fat Katie on the couch looking for a belly rub, sat down, and turned on the television. Randomly scrolling through the channels, I came across the start of a Christmas movie on the Hallmark channel. My mom was always a fan and watched them religiously. She passed last year at 90, and for whatever reason, I felt compelled to watch. Boy, was it bad? I loved it and watched another right after it and cried. Thank you for the article, Spot on for me. Best to you, Amanda. You rock, Judy.

She's describing this as a inheritance.

Yeah, it's a new tradition.

All right, I want another.

Okay, let's see. Here's another that I really liked. Hi, Amanda. I've never written to a journalist before. Here we go. Or written in the comments section, but I was compelled to do so by your article. Boy, do I feel old this holiday season, L-O-L. I had the exact same reaction did about a week ago. I'm currently undergoing IVF and had my embryo transfer Tuesday. As part of my lay low routine, I watched every single good, bad Christmas movie on Netflix. By Hot Frosty, I was like, Wow, what happened to me. When did I reach this low? How can they keep a straight face? Why can't I look away? I am their target demographic. Thanks, XX, Alejandra.

That is literally the mirror image of what happened to you.

Yeah. Whenever I write anything, I think I'm like, I'm so odd. No one could ever relate to me. There's something wrong with me. I found out in this case that that's definitely not true.

Yeah. You're more universal than you maybe give yourself credit for it.

Maybe so.

In listening to you read those emails and assuming that there's dozens more like them in your inbox, it occurs to me that the phenomenon you're experiencing here is not that complicated. Right? Maybe in the beginning, you overcomplicated the whole thing with your view of these movies, and you should have never doubted their value. I mean, we do at the New York Times tend to fetishize complexity, right? Right. That's true. In arts and in culture. But complex doesn't always make for a comforting ritual because life is pretty complicated as it is. So maybe the movies don't have to be.

Yeah. I I think at the beginning, I was thinking, the existence of these movies fascinates me, but they're so bad and I would never watch them. I should have just been more comfortable stopping at these movies fascinate me. There were many years that I could have been enjoying these hundreds of movies that I chose not to.

What is the future here between you and this brand of movie? Is this a forever thing?

I think it is I sound so depressed when I say that. I mean, I think it's like none of these movies will become my classic Christmas movie that I watch every year, but I will watch a movie that is nearly identical when it comes out next year. I'll watch 12 of them. Yeah.

I mean, to put this very simply, they've got you.

They got me.

You didn't want to be gotten, but you got.

No, they want me over, and I'm in love.

Well, Amanda, thank you very much for being here. As it happens, this is the last episode that we are going to be running of the Daily Before Christmas Day. So, Merry Christmas to you.

Merry Christmas to you.

And thank you for coming.

Thank you so much for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, President Biden commuted the sentences of nearly all prisoners on federal death row, meaning that they will instead serve life sentences without parole. The decision prevents President-elect Trump from ordering the prisoner's executions as he has promised to Biden campaigned on ending the federal death penalty and ordered that such executions be stopped during his presidency. Still, he did not commute the sentences of three notorious death row prisoners who were convicted of hate-motivated mass murder and terrorism, including the Boston Marathon bomber. And a highly anticipated report by the House Ethics Committee found that Matt Gates, the former Republican congressman from Florida, regularly paid for sex, had sexual relations with an underage girl, and used illegal drugs. Gates, who resigned from Congress last month, was Trump's pick to run the Department of Justice before he withdrawn over accusations that were largely confirmed by the House Ethics Report. Gates, for his part, denies any wrongdoing. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipco, Alex Stern, and Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Rachel Quester with help from Lexie D. Al. Contains original music by Alishaba Itup and Diane Wong.

And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferck of Wunderly.RLE. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilbaro. See you tomorrow..