What’s a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie without a romantic dance scene? A hunk in a tuxedo waltzing with a woman in an elegant dress in front of tinsel-adorned trees? It practically screams Hallmark.
Which is why when Hallmark decided to launch its foray into reality competition shows last year on its Hallmark+ streaming service, it leaned into those tropes. Finding Mr. Christmas, hosted by Jonathan Bennett, featured a handful of wannabe Hallmark hunks competing in challenges plucked straight from the channel’s holiday films, with the winner starring in a Hallmark Original Movie of their own.
“There are two types of people in the world: There are people that watch Hallmark Christmas movies, and liars,” Bennett quips in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “Everyone likes a Christmas movie, it just is part of pop culture. The way I approach this was, lets plug Finding Mr. Christmas into the pop culture zeitgeist of Christmas movies at the holidays, which everyone watches. So if you take those tropes of a Christmas movie, the meet cute, the apology scene, the breakup scene, the ice skating, if you take all those tropes and find a way to gamify them … Now this show isn’t just for the Hallmark viewer, this show is for everyone. It becomes something that everyone can watch and it’s guilty pleasure television.”
Now Hallmark is doubling down on that guilty pleasure TV, in an effort to keep viewers engaged outside of the traditional Christmas season, on both its linear channel and streaming option. Hallmark on Wednesday will announce that it is developing a full slate of unscripted fare, including new seasons of the Hallmark+ shows Finding Mr. Christmas and Celebrations with Lacey Chabert, as well as concepts like a baking competition and a murder mystery competition series.
And while Hallmark’s previous efforts were focused on Hallmark+, moving forward the shows will debut on Hallmark Channel, branded as “Reality TV with heart,” and then streaming the next day.
“Hallmark is known around Christmas time and around the holidays, but there’s an opportunity to tell those stories year-round,” says David Stefanou, Hallmark’s head of unscripted. “With Hallmark, people know what it is. So with our programming we’re able to embrace it … we can actually make shows that are about the brand. Finding Mr. Christmas, it’s a little bit meta. It’s a hunt for the next Hallmark hunk. We know that those hallmark stars are extremely popular with our viewers, so we formed a competition around it, so you get both your entertainment value, and we actually created a new star in the process.”
Hallmark also leaned into the home and hospitality genres, which tuck in nicely with the dramas that the channel runs throughout the year.
“What I’m trying to do is take the familiar, and because unscripted is new for our core viewers, take a familiar sort of genre, and really put our spin on it and make it uniquely Hallmark,” Stefanou says.
Celebrations is a good example. Chabert has appeared in 40 Hallmark movies, and last year inked a deal that includes multiple films, a product line, and a second season of Celebrations.
“I’m not used to just being myself on camera. I’m used to playing a character, and so it was something completely new and slightly intimidating at first, but I absolutely loved it, because I love talking to people, I love hearing people’s stories,” Chabert says. “I’m that person that at the grocery store when I’m checking out before I’m done, typically, I will have engaged in conversations and heard the cashier’s life story.”
But there is a throughline for all of Hallmark’s unscripted projects: The Hallmark brand “stands for something,” Stefanou notes, and in order for a project to get the green light, it needs to feel natural to the platform, even if it may stand in the way of many typical reality TV tropes.
“What we witnessed was these grown men opening up and being vulnerable and talking to other grown men about their feelings, about their fears, about the things that make them nervous in life in general,” says Bennett of Finding Mr. Christmas, in which the contestants are simultaneously competing with each there while also befriending each other. “I don’t want to say never, but you pick a show and tell me a scene where you had 10 grown men crying and expressing things that most men wouldn’t talk about to their friends, privately, let alone on national television like that. I think that’s where the Hallmark brand came in, we figured out how to do a show where we have competition, high stakes, but at the end of the day, the guys and our contestants feel so supported and love that they can open up and share, and then guess what, they’re connecting with the audience, and the audience is watching.”
“Everything with Hallmark, I feel like falls under the banner of putting some goodness back into the world and bringing out the joy in life and connecting people,” Chabert says. “It’s all about connection and journeys that our audience can hopefully see themselves in and relate to. And the same feeling of goodness and love that we find in the movies is absolutely the focus of the unscripted series as well.”
And at a moment where reality TV shows are proliferating, but often with an ugly underbelly, the cable brand is betting that its antidote will resonate with an audience on both linear TV and streaming. And producers are excited as well.
“People are, I think, trained to go to the lowest common denominator: What is the most outrageous, shocking thing you can do to get people’s attention?” Stefanou says. “For someone to come through our door to hear what we’re looking for and know that they can actually make uplifting, positive stories that are going to make people feel better, and not make shows about broken people getting more broken, was a real revelation and a real breath of fresh air.”
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