Candace Cameron Bure has said that traditional marriage will be the focus of Great American Familiy’s Christmas movie lineup — but what does that even mean?
Candace Cameron Bure might just have a point. Don’t you miss the good old days of Hallmark Christmas movies, back before they got all “woke”? Back when a big city real estate developer would fall in love with a small town rancher, or when a small town designer would fall in love with a big city movie star, or when another big city real estate developer would fall in love with a small town innkeeper, or when a big city married couple would fall back in love at a small town inn — those were Christmas movies! Fortunately, those are all movies that were made this year.
It turns out that the nightmarish erosion of good old Christian values and American morals that’s ruined Hallmark movies, as Candace Cameron Bure so implies in a Wall Street Journal profile, doesn’t exist. The only reason she gives for going exclusive with Great American Family is that Hallmark “basically is a completely different network than when I started because of the change of leadership.”
What is Bure talking about? What has changed so much that she would break a 9-year streak at the undisputed king network of Christmas movies? And we are talking about Christmas movies too, movies that aren’t afraid to put Christmas in the title. There’s one Hanukkah movie this year, the same as in 2021 and 2020. Kwanzaa gets half a movie, sharing it with Christmas in this year’s Holiday Heritage. The specific holiday that these holiday movies are celebrating hasn’t changed. The lineup is still called Countdown to Christmas! So it can’t be the “war on Christmas” that got Bure spooked.
Hallmark does have a few more leads of color than they have in the past, including two films with leads of Asian descent. But on the whole? Only six movies of forty feature two leads of color. Granted, that is six more than were part of the 2017 lineup, back when Hallmark was presumably more aligned with Bure’s values. For comparison, one of Great American Family’s seventeen 2022 originals has two leads of color.
So really — what has changed? Some of the gender roles have changed, like the rancher I mentioned in the first paragraph was a woman (!).
