Made-for-TV Christmas movies have filled the schedule at the Hallmark Channel and Lifetime for a couple of months now, but it's time for the premieres of the 2020 crop. Get ready for 82 new ways to wallow in Christmas and eat up the hours spent at home. Yes, they are formulaic, but 2020 is the year to indulge in safe guilty pleasures.
You know that thing people say about Taco Bell? That the whole menu is just five ingredients (tortillas, cheese, meat, beans, sauce) remixed and rearranged in infinite combinations? Made-for-TV Christmas is the Taco Bell of entertainment genres. Take the same haggard tropes — the struggling inns, the small towns, the career women who must be cured of their unladylike ambitions by falling in love with boring men — and just switch the names and actors around, and it's a tradition that works year after year.
The list of synopses (and trailers) at Vulture is divided into themes, since several movies share the same setup, plots, or attempts to stand out. There are three movies centered on blogging (as if that's interesting), nine with a land developer as the villain (because how else will you save the school/wilderness/historic landmark?), six with "scavenger hunt" as a plot device, and four (count 'em, FOUR) movies with LGBTQ themes. And a partridge in a pear tree somewhere, I'm sure. Happy wallowing!
