Hallmark Movie Politics: Some Thoughts

For a quarter of a century now--since the time when TV critics became completely unhinged after their first viewing of The Sopranos--prestige TV has been the center of even semi-serious discussion of the medium (as seen in the inordinate attention and praise lavished upon Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Euphoria and the rest). Profoundly distorting any conception of what the country at large was watching as "coastal elites" stood in for the nation as a whole (one easily forgets that in The Sopranos' original run no more than a third of households even had HBO), it has crowded a great deal else out of the conversation about television, while even when those leading it deign to notice that "good deal else" discussing it through the lens of the same prejudices that have it making so much of the "prestige" stuff.

Hallmark's television empire, along with it its imitators and rivals, such as ex-Hallmark President William Abbott-founded Great American Family (and even in a limited way, the long crime-fixated Lifetime), is exemplary of that, these channels pointedly producing what one might think of as anti-prestige TV--eschewing as they do the subordination of storytelling to slow and oblique Show-don't-tell narrative technique, "gritty" or "edgy" R-rated material, and preoccupation with coastal elite obsessions (like identity politics) in favor of light, chaste romantic comedies with a sideline in cozy murder mysteries. The phenomenon has had too many successes for TV critics to not say something about it, but when they do remark it they tend to do so with a sneer (whether mocking at its movies for casts that do not look like those of a Jaguar commercial, or the formulaic storylines), but also superficially, missing much that does seem to me to merit remark.

One particular point of interest would seem the ways in which Hallmark really isn't so different from its "cooler" counterparts. An obvious case is its overwhelming focus on people of comparative affluence, with an "upper middle classness" that might in real life be described as closer to wealth the national if not the human norm, most obviously in how everyone lives in a big beautiful house such as very few can afford. Consistent with this there is the fact that if Hallmark-type movies lavish enormous affection on the "heartland," and on small towns, such as much other media slights, they do not sneer at the big city and its luxuries, which are ever available to the characters, who never lack opportunities for luxury shopping or fine dining. (Indeed, one Hallmark film, Switched for Christmas--set in, of all places, Littleton, Colorado, and presenting that locality with all its less than happy associations for many as the epitome of small-town charm--one character positively remarks how living here they had the benefits of small-town living all as the big-city attractions of Denver were just one hour's drive away.) As is usually the case with American TV no one worries much about how it is that the characters can lead their plush existences (certainly it is hard to explain how Aurora Teagarden enjoys her enviable living standard on a librarian's salary), but it is nevertheless the case that with the channel's turn to its present "ultra-cozy" fare some years ago, after which one became much less likely to, for example, see a struggling single mother waiting tables in a greasy spoon, just about all of the protagonists of these movies are either upwardly mobile career women, or independent owners of successful small businesses. If displaying less Rah-Rag and #Girlboss edge as they go about it is nonetheless the case that this very "Red State" entertainment pointedly embraces (a thoroughly bourgeois) feminism on this score, as, like its Blue State counterpart it presents its sunny version of capitalism in an America where working class problems just don't seem to exist. Of course, similarities of that nature across the range of TV production are exactly the kind of thing that goes right over our television critics' heads as they do their respective bits in the culture war--and in the process remind those attentive to what they are not talking about as well as what they are that keeping public attention away from such matters is precisely the reason why the culture war exists in the first place.