How Hallmark Took Over Cable Television

Source: The New Yorker, Sarah Larson
Photo: During the holiday season, Hallmark outperforms almost every other network. (Bendik Kaltenborn)

By “leaning into Christmas”—and claiming to avoid politics—the greeting-card company has come to dominate screens across America.

A few months ago, in a house near Vancouver, nine actors in festive aprons gathered around a kitchen island to shoot a montage for the Hallmark Channel movie “Christmas in Evergreen: Tidings of Joy.” The island was covered in cookie-making ingredients. The director, Sean McNamara, a veteran of Hallmark movies and Disney kids’ series, sat at monitors nearby. “O.K.!” he called out. “You’re having fun, you’re making cookies, it’s Christmas, and action! ”

The actors rolled dough and picked up cookie cutters. The montage would be dialogue-free, overlaid with music; to set the tone, McNamara cued up “Jingle Bell Rock.” The cast began to bob. “Good, but we probably shouldn’t be dancing!” McNamara yelled. One actor, looking serious, lifted an icing bag. “Remember, you’re having fun, and there’s funny stuff going on!” McNamara said. The actors burst into smiles and laughter. “Now the cake!” McNamara said. Paul Greene, a former J. Crew model and the male lead, presented the group with a white fondant cake topped with pine trees. They shook powdered sugar on it. “Cut!” McNamara yelled. “Brilliant!”

The Hallmark Channel is a cable network owned and operated by the greeting-card company. This year, the channel and a sister network, Hallmark Movies and Mysteries, produced a hundred and three original movies; forty are about Christmas. Since 2011, from late October to January, Hallmark has broadcast Christmas movies nearly twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. (The Hallmark Movie Checklist app, which helps guide viewers to new films, has 1.5 million users.) During this year’s holiday season, the programming, called Countdown to Christmas, has made Hallmark the No. 1 cable network among women between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, and, in some prime-time slots, No. 1 in households and total viewers. Last year, seventy-two million people watched Countdown to Christmas. Fans talk of turning it on and leaving it on all season; it dominates TV screens in hospitals and nursing homes. “Guys come up to me on the golf course and whisper, ‘I love your Christmas movies!’ ” the actor Cameron Mathison (“The Christmas Club,” “The Christmas Ornament”) told me. Lifetime, the women’s network long known for movies with titles like “In Bed with a Killer” and “Your Husband Is Mine,” now airs its own Hallmark-esque Christmas movies, in a block called It’s a Wonderful Lifetime. Netflix, Ion, Freeform, and own have started making them, too.

Hallmark films tend to center on independent women with interesting jobs (novelists, chocolatiers) and appealing romantic prospects (princes, firemen). Programming is seasonal; as the year progresses, characters pair up amid winter wonderlands, Valentine’s Day chocolate-making contests, fireworks celebrations, pumpkin patches, and Christmas parties. The familiarity of the films is essential to their success. Hallmark screenplays have nine acts, each of which hits specific plot points—a meet-cute in Act I, before the first commercial, an “almost kiss” in Act VII. The shots are lit with a distinctive warmth. Actors recur. The settings often recall Saturday Evening Post covers by Norman Rockwell, whose painting “Shuffleton’s Barbershop” inspired a Hallmark movie of the same name, and several productions have been filmed at ersatz pioneer villages. As Danica McKellar, a Hallmark regular once best known as Winnie Cooper, from “The Wonder Years,” told me, many actors “bring nostalgia with us.”

In Hallmark films, townspeople care for one another, run viable small businesses, and compete in gingerbread bake-offs—America as we might wish it were, and as some believe it once was. It has thrived in the Trump era. Last year, it was one of the only networks to gain viewers besides Fox News and MSNBC. It also depicts a purple America, without guns, maga hats, rage. Bill Abbott, the C.E.O. of Crown Media, Hallmark’s entertainment company, told me that it’s “your place to go to get away from politics, to get away from everything in your life that is problematic and negative, and to feel like there are people out there who are good human beings that could make you feel happy to be part of the human race.”

Hallmark’s America is also straight, often Christian, and, until recently, mostly white. Meghan Markle, whose biracial parentage made headlines after her engagement to Prince Harry, starred in two Hallmark movies; in the Fourth of July romance “When Sparks Fly,” from 2014, her character had white parents. In 2017, the African-American TV and film actor Holly Robinson Peete pitched a wholesome reality show about her family to Hallmark. “Meet the Peetes” aired for two seasons. “There were six of us—seven, including my mom—so that was a lot of diversity at once,” she told me.

The “Evergreen” series, which began in 2017, now sees Peete playing the mayor of Evergreen, Vermont, a quaint town based on a line of Hallmark cards. The movies begin with a shot of the illustrations that inspired them, some featuring a vintage red pickup truck, which appears in the movies. A miniature of it is available as a Hallmark Christmas decoration, for $39.99. Many Hallmark films involve some form of lucrative “integration”—product placement. Balsam Hill synthetic Christmas trees appear frequently; in “Holiday Hearts,” from November, an eligible doctor (Paul Campbell) demonstrates the settings of a tree’s remote-controlled lights for a full minute. On the set of “Christmas in Evergreen: Tidings of Joy,” McNamara and his crew shot a scene that featured a foldaway Ninja Foodi oven. “It’s important to show nine cookies on the sheet,” Sunta Izzicupo, the film’s executive producer, said. On the monitor, an actor approached the oven, said, “No room? No problem,” opened its door, and inserted a tray of nine cookies shaped like pickup trucks.

One theme of “Tidings of Joy,” written by Zac Hug, is whether Evergreen is too good to be true. (In some ways, it’s the quintessential Hallmark Christmas movie; in others, it’s a playfully self-aware critique of the genre.) In the film, Katie (Maggie Lawson), a savvy big-city journalist, makes a wish on a magical snow globe, bakes cookies, goes carolling and ice-skating, and watches the unveiling of a time capsule inside a fifteen-foot advent calendar. She also falls in love with Ben (Greene), the local librarian. The day after the cookie shoot, at a historic-house museum in Vancouver, McNamara sat at video monitors in a circa-1895 kitchen, near a hand-cranked wooden telephone. He was about to direct the film’s highest point of tension—the “almost breakup,” usually at the end of Act VIII—which takes place at the Evergreen Library, where Ben has discovered Katie’s notes for what appears to be an exposé of the town. Lawson and Greene were surrounded by wreaths, garlands, and Christmas knickknacks. Paper lanterns softened the lighting. Greene, reading Katie’s notes, said, “ ‘Despite the warmth and honest connection these people feel, it’s hard not to wonder how much of Evergreen is an act.’ ” His tone hinted at anger.

“Cut!” McNamara said. “Paul, you need to take down, like, twenty per cent of the edge.” A key tenet of Hallmark screenplays, the veteran writer-director Ron Oliver told me, is that conflict “can never seem like it’s gone so far that it can’t be resolved.” In the next take, Greene delivered the line in a tone of gentle disbelief. “Brilliant!” McNamara said.

In 1910, Joyce Clyde Hall, an entrepreneurial Nebraska teen-ager and the son of a Methodist minister, took a train to Kansas City, Missouri, bringing with him two boxes of postcards. Printed postcards had become a hot commodity, and Hall had a talent for sales. In 1914, he and his older brother Rollie formed a company called Hall Brothers, opened a shop, and began printing their own greeting cards and paper goods. The First World War was a turning point for the industry: servicemen and their loved ones enjoyed sending and receiving cards and became lifelong card buyers. “And I saw something else in the custom,” Hall wrote in his 1979 memoir, “When You Care Enough”: “A way of giving less articulate people, and those who tend to disguise their feelings, a voice to express their love and affection.” In 1916, Hall Brothers began printing cards that came with their own envelopes; in 1917, they invented modern wrapping paper.

The brothers began using the name Hallmark, after a goldsmith’s stamp of quality, in 1928, and later paired it with a crown logo. By mid-century, Hallmark had pioneered a new card-display technique, similar to what we still see in drugstores; formed partnerships with Disney and Norman Rockwell; and built a huge headquarters, in Kansas City. In the process, the company became so intertwined with the idea of holiday celebration that the term “Hallmark holiday” entered the public vocabulary, connoting a holiday rooted as much in commercialism as in tradition.

In 1951, Joyce Hall wrote to his sales team, “Dear Fellows: We’re going to try our hand at television.” Inspired by the medium’s educational and entertainment possibilities, he wanted Hallmark to deliver edifying fare. That year, the company sponsored the first original opera written for television, “Amahl and the Night Visitors”; later, under the name Hallmark Hall of Fame, it sponsored TV productions of literary adaptations, Broadway plays, and, in time, original films. It became the most award-winning franchise in television history, with eighty-one Emmys.

Hallmark formed Crown Media in 1991, and ventured into cable. Later that decade, it bought an interest in the religious network Odyssey, which, in 2001, it took over fully, renaming it the Hallmark Channel. According to Bill Abbott, who ran Crown’s advertising sales from 2000 to 2009, before becoming its C.E.O., “the strategy at the outset wasn’t to draw close to the brand. It didn’t really have a filter.” For a decade, the channel aired motley family entertainment, Hallmark Hall of Fame films, and original movies, made by an independent producer.

There were a few standouts. One was the eleven-film “Love Comes Softly” series, released from 2003 to 2011. Based on novels by the Canadian evangelical-Christian writer Janette Oke, the movies are lightly religious frontier dramas set out West. I watched several around 2009; inside the films’ covered wagons and behind their butter churns, I discovered, yellow-haired TV stars like Katherine Heigl and January Jones were living lives of noble forbearance. There were occasional speeches about the Lord, but there was also hardship and heart, à la “Little House on the Prairie”—if Pa hurt his leg, a handsome stranger would help plow the fields. Other films were set in a down-home romanticized present, among characters who proudly respect sentimental art. Some of them praise Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade; in one film, a painter feels betrayed, but then grateful, when her art is used in an ad campaign. “Art is about creativity and being a free spirit,” she says in Act IX, just before the kiss. “It’s not restrictive or rigid, so why should I be?” Her painting is of Santa Claus.

These series and films, along with “The Christmas Card,” a surprisingly effective love story between a soldier and a mill owner’s daughter, from 2006, helped inspire Abbott, when he became C.E.O., in 2009, to push Hallmark to “embody the brand on TV.” “I love greeting cards and I love Hallmark stores,” Abbott told me when I met him at Hallmark’s Manhattan offices. To him, the stores give a sense of “comfort, positivity, connections.” “You should turn on our channel and almost feel like you’re walking into a Gold Crown store,” he said. Abbott is fifty-seven, with thinning gray hair, a warm, confident demeanor, and an adenoidal vocal quality, like a man powering through a cold. He told me that he had been influenced, too, by the distinctive two-minute Hallmark-card commercials that had aired during the Hall of Fame broadcasts, starting in the sixties, which became famous for making viewers cry. In “The Music Professor,” from 1983, a girl races to arrive at a piano lesson before her teacher and hides a card between the pages of her sheet music. When he finds it, both struggle to contain their emotions.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/how-hallmark-took-over-cable-tv