Hellmark Channel: Season One

Hallmark movies have become synonymous with Christmas season. Saccharine flicks running day and night, set in towns where it snows on sidewalks but not on streets, where personal shoppers are in high demand, and where accomplished city gals are conflicted by burgeoning love for country living.

The most casual Hallmark Channel viewer can tell you that the characters and plot tropes in Hallmark’s Christmas movies do not deviate from white-bread formula.

By script’s end, a sweater-wearing male with a strained maternal relationship is going to convince a hottie like Taylor Cole that saving a tree farm is life’s highest calling.

Or Ed Asner is going to dispense life-changing romantic advice to millenials, because that’s what gruffly, 88-year-olds with advanced osteo do from park bench perches.

High Time for Hellmark

The sappy-ending homogeneity of Hallmark Channel uplifts occasionally but mostly it is taxing for all but the amnestic. Hallmark desperately needs a grittier, alternative channel added to its mix: Hallmark in the Upside Down, or Hellmark.

Hellmark Channel movies would still take place during the holidays, but characters and crisis resolutions would not be nearly as vanilla or predictable.

To illustrate the potential of Hellmark, I have created capsules for ten movie plots.

Now I need the wisdom of the crowd: please vote for your three favorites in the poll at the end of this blog. I’ll share the results with Hallmark Channel executives.

 

VETTING HER FRUSTRATION

Brad is a single dad, raising 5-year-old Cloe while working as the town’s only veterinarian. Tiffany runs a bake shop and just rescued the cutest Golden Retriever, Champ. When an unguarded Champ eats a big batch of Tiffany’s famous chocolate Christmas cookies, she rushes him to Brad’s practice — but he is binge-drinking in faraway woods. Champ dies a miserable death. DYFS claims Cloe. Tiffany moves to a town with two vets.

 

JINGLE BALLS  

Visiting family for the holidays, a star dancer with the Pennsylvania Ballet enjoys spirited, post-dinner street hockey with his nephews until fate intervenes: a 90-mph slap shot to his unprotected crotch. The only surgical option is to replace his shattered testicles with an experimental alloy that reverberates like wind chimes whenever he leaps.

 

BRINE’S SONG

Working at his hometown pickle factory during semester break, collegiate football star Billy Flute suffers a catastrophic injury when he slips on Gherkin juice and careens into the automatic slicer. No one feels worse than best friend Gayle – an aspiring songwriter and co-worker whose negligence led to the accident. Gayle charts a Top 10 Country tear-jerker – Dill We Meet Again — just in time to cover Billy’s Christmas Day funeral costs.

 

I SAW MOMMY ENTERTAINING SANTA CLAUS

Four-year-old Cooper is confused. He learned about gender fluidity in daycare, and already realizes that his masculinity is toxic. But he cannot understand why the mall Santa Claus is delivering gifts to his house in July, and making him pancakes whenever dad has out-of-town conventions. (Contains inappropriate stocking stuffer references.)

 

SING LIKE NO ONE IS READING

She’s twelve, passionate about singing, but struggles with dyslexia. Transfer-student Becky has a decision to make: deny her dream of performing a hymn at the middle school Christmas program, or hope her new classmates accept her earnest rendition of The First Leon.

 

HOE, HOE, NO!

Who is this American hussy in the provocative Santa’s Helper outfit at the mall, and why is she flirting with the visiting prince from an unspecified Western European country? The royal mismatch ruffles the Queen, who arranges the vixen’s firing after entering into a steamy dalliance with gruffly, 88-year-old mall manager Ed Asner. The crestfallen young miss catches a break when she lands Billy Flute’s old job at the pickle factory.

 

WHAT THE DICKENS!

Sarah loves books and archaic business models; the hard truth is that unless sales soar this holiday season, her family bookstore will have to close its doors after five generations. Sarah’s boyfriend — a ballet dancer recuperating from a horrific hockey accident — has a Hail Mary plan: authoring a children’s book centered on experimental testicular surgery. Everyone in town shows up for the big Christmas Eve book signing of “Nutcracker: Dance Like No One Can Hear You.”

 

THE BOWELS OF HOLLY

Rising advertising exec Holly has the opportunity of a lifetime: a pitch to win the town’s top-billing account. Arch-rival Caitlyn has other plans: pouring castor oil in Holly’s coffee before the big presentation. Holly soils herself spectacularly, clearing the boardroom and her chances for career advancement – but not for love. As she listens to Maintenance Manager Brad whistle as he mops up, she realizes she has met the one man willing to put up with all of her S***

 

NO TWO FLAKES ARE ALIKE

It is Christmas season but things are not all jolly in the Eczema Wing at the Indigent Inn – a fierce winter storm has made delivery of moisturizing lotion impossible. Meanwhile, spunky Activities Director Julie has another problem: the snow machine needed to replicate a blizzard for the holiday play is kaput. Ignoring a dozen health codes, Julie convinces the excematics to scale the auditorium rafters and scrape their flaky skin in unison for a show-saving finale.

 

THE LAST CHRISTMAS IN BASTARD TOWN

An itinerant snowman – pretending to be a parson – settles down in an Iowa town and creates havoc by presiding over hundreds of illegal marriages. When a reporter reveals the snowman’s deception at the annual Christmas parade, the fabric of the town unravels: the blue bird returns, and couples become afraid to face the plans they had made. Gruffly, 88-year-old Mayor Ed Asner proclaims the end of Christmas, commits the town’s bastard children to a run-down orphanage, and vacates his post to canoodle with a queen from an unspecified Western European country.