Hallmark Hell And More: An Icy Look At The Sleighload of Christmas Specials
Here it is two days before Christmas, which means we’re almost to the end of the pestilent parade of inane Christmas specials.
Every year it’s the same old story. The shows can be broken up into the usual categories:
Roaming bands of has-beens, never-beens and sometime-before-the-Stone-Age-beens hit the screen to mangle the Christmas songs we know and love. “And now, I’d like to introduce a dear, dear friend of mine, Mario Lopez, who will sing `Silent Night.’ AAARRGGHHH!”
Quirky, one-hour dramas have cutesy, dumb episodes about vagrants named Kris Kringle washing into their hospitals and law firms.
Worst of all, there are special “Christmas episodes” of such unlikely contenders as “Baywatch.” “Hmm . . . I’m getting a lot of requests for silicon here,” Santa is heard to mumble.
And of course there are the Hallmark films, featuring white women dumping successful city guys for flannel wearing hometown bros for whom “awww shucks” is a swear, which are a special ring of hell best completely ignored.
These shows are the gauche scrooges of the holiday TV schedule. Vapid and specious, they degrade a sacred and honest season with their superficial presence.
One nice thing to note is that people haven’t been buying it.
The Nielsen ratings prove that while these types of shows are struggling, some classic Christmas shows — “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman” and the like — are still drawing Santa-sized numbers.
