In Praise of Second-Rate Hallmark Holiday Movies

Notes on Christmas camp.

Brandy Norwood and Heather Graham in Netflix’s Best. Christmas. Ever! (Source.)

On Monday, Claire Fallon and Emma Gray’s newsletter hit my inbox and the headline activated my impulse to click on it immediately.

“‘Best. Christmas. Ever!’ Is One of Netflix’s Worst Holiday Flicks Yet,” wrote the duo, also the co-hosts of the pop culture podcast Rich Text, in which they discussed the streamer’s festive new film. They are very funny about their mutual contempt. They skewer Best. Christmas. Ever! with a delight that I generally reserve for things that I love. “Brandy Norwood, Heather Graham, and Jason Biggs star alongside Matt Cedeño in a flimsily plotted and produced movie about the importance of holiday family newsletters,” they scoffed, adding, “The plot twists get weirder and more upsetting as the movie winds toward its surprisingly bizarre conclusion. Brandy and Graham appear to be acting in entirely different kinds of projects, ‘acting’ being a fairly generous term.”

A far more reasonable person might accept their review and say, Thank you for your brutal honesty. I will scratch this off my to-watch list and instead stream Little Women (the Winona Ryder version) on continuous loop.

Not I. I logged into Netflix and bought a ticket to experience the train wreck firsthand. Reader, it did not disappoint. The setup held promise. Charlotte (Graham), an inventor with an inferiority complex, receives an irritating annual Christmas letter from her perfect friend Jackie (Norwood), whose palatial, twinkle-lit home looks like a backdrop for a Mariah Carey music video. Jackie and Mariah are BFFs, by the way, and Jackie’s 10-year-old daughter just so happens to be the youngest student in Harvard’s history. Charlotte’s same-age son, meanwhile, maintains a codependent relationship with a stuffed monkey named Bob.

When Charlotte, her husband Rob (Biggs) and their kids go on a holiday road trip, GPS mistakenly leads them to Chateau Jackie. Charlotte is mortified; Jackie, eager to reconnect following years apart, is delighted. By some odd, unexplained twist of fate, the unanticipated guests get snowed in and cannot leave. Cue the shenanigans! As Rich Text warned, the scenes build to a crescendo of preposterousness that defies logic and explanation. How on earth could this dumb movie have been made, when somewhere there are a pile of brilliant scripts waiting to happen? Does Netflix think we’re stupid? Why did I reflexively giggle at Charlotte kicking a snowman and Rob revealing that he was once in a No Doubt cover band called “Total Certainty”? What is Norwood, the talented vocalist behind the ’90s R&B masterpiece “The Boy Is Mine,” doing … in “the first completely solar-powered hot-air balloon”?

I couldn’t dismiss the actors — Graham grimaces with delightful relatability and Norwood sparkles like Christmas magic — but Claire and Emma’s argument rings true: Best. Christmas. Ever! is indeed one of Netflix’s worst holiday flicks yet. I also enjoyed it immensely. The movie knows how bad it is; it’s totally in on the joke. Movies like this appeal to smart people in part because they’re over-the-top, chucking good taste out the window — just like your neighbor who hoists a 25-foot, blow-up Santa in her front yard the day after Thanksgiving and keeps it there through January 3. (The kind of seasonal hijinks that fuel local lore, that turn Everywoman into a legend.) It speaks volumes that Best. Christmas. Ever! was directed by Mary Lambert, who previously carved a niche helming horror B-movies such as Pet Sematary and its sequel. Lambert has an ample sense of humor and surprises up her sleeve. Two winters ago, Netflix hired her to direct Brooke Shields in the tartan-soaked A Castle for Christmas, a huge streaming hit. The algorithm has apparently decided that, come December, it will compete alongside the Hallmark and Lifetime channels, and Hulu and Disney+, to produce guilty-pleasure, second-rate comedies that contain as many meaningful life lessons as a TED Talk given by Ted Lasso. Best. Christmas. Ever! tackles a hard subject like grief with unexpected and literal buoyancy. (You’ll see what I mean.) (Since Hallmark still owns this space, I’m calling it a Hallmark movie.)

Over the 2008 holidays, I tagged along with my parents to a Costa Rican resort. It was lovely and I was extremely lucky to be there, but it also crawled with happy young honeymooners who took over the pool. (Really?) On the days we weren’t exploring rainforests and snapping photos of sloths and volcanoes, I sat solo underneath an umbrella reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (Innovative yet depressing.) At night, there was nothing really on television except old Friends reruns and ABC Family, to which my mom and I became glued. We laughed until we cried while watching Holiday in Handcuffs, co-starring Melissa Joan Hart and Mario Lopez. Hart plays a deranged waitress who kidnaps a restaurant customer (Lopez) and takes him home for Christmas, tricking everyone into thinking he is her boyfriend.

It remains an all-time Best Worst Movie, one we still talk about to this day. Sometimes a good laugh is what you remember. Sometimes, it’s exactly what you need.

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Special shout-outs:

*Jennifer Armstrong: Whose new book, the wonderfully entertaining and incisive So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (and Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It), arrives January 16. Pick it up at Bookshop!

*Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa and Da’Vine Joy Randolph: For their marvelous ensemble work in The Holdovers, a movie I liked so much that I bought it.

*My beautiful mom, Laurel: Who turns 70 years old tomorrow. Happy milestone birthday to the best of the best, the real queen of Christmas — move over, Mariah!