Rose McIver and Ben Lamb in "A Christmas Prince: A Royal Wedding." She goes from being a junior copy editor to getting assigned to cover the biggest royal wedding in modern history, which no one thinks is weird at all.
NetflixAs excited as I was for the new season of "The Crown," I had to stop binging a few episodes in. If we're being honest with ourselves, that show is a sensation because us plebes love rubbernecking at miserable rich people. But in 2020, stressed by every single thing happening in the news, watching teenage Princess Diana suffer was too much. I started feeling anxious. The escape wasn't an escape anymore. It was just another stressor.
Luckily, it's November. Which means Netflix, Amazon Prime and seemingly half the channels on network TV are filled with an endless stream of the dumbest, lowest budget, most mindless content imaginable: holiday romance movies.
(Let's get this out of the way: These movies are not good. At no point will I attempt to convince you "The Princess Switch: Switched Again" is a misunderstood art form. These movies are trash. We all agree. Let's move on.)
People who have not immersed themselves in Hallmark Channel-esque holiday movies often criticize them for being formulaic and unrealistic. They are, of course, both — and that's what makes them so fun. They exist in a world untethered from reality, and that world has expanded beyond just the namesake Hallmark Channel, crossing into original content at Netflix and Amazon Prime. The Hallmark Cinematic Universe is the schlocky holiday equivalent of comic book movies. They are set in worlds much like our own but supercharged with wildly unrealistic details. Aldovia and Montenaro are the holiday movie versions of Gotham. They're nearly a real place but not quite, because no one's in student loan debt and at least one character owns a cafe. It's a self-contained world where princes are always in the midst of a succession crisis, burned-out career women keep winning contests to own an inn, and time travel is so standard the movie doesn't even bother to explain it.
Vanessa Hudgens plays both a pastry chef and a duchess in "The Princess Switch." It's every bit as stupid as it sounds.
NetflixAs a result, these are the most unpredictable movies around. Yes, the real estate agent is obviously going to end up with the Duke of Fakey-dovia at the end, but you cannot possibly predict the random, illogical events leading up to that outcome. The Hallmark Cinematic Universe is pure chaos.
Take, for example, "Christmas with a Prince." Its precipitating event is a prince getting into a minor ski accident. He breaks his leg (not in an Alex Smith way, in a normal, quick trip to the ER way) and for some reason requires extended hospitalization. His American nurse friend Kevin — they went to boarding school together; sure, why not — brokers a deal with the hospital to set the prince up in the children's cancer ward. Why does a minor accident require weeks in a hospital? Why can't the prince of a first-world nation convalesce at home? Why did KEVIN go to boarding school with European royalty?
Or try the unsettling colonialist spin that is Netflix's "Operation Christmas Drop." Sure, the chiseled soldier and the pretty bureaucrat are going to get married. But you'll spend days afterward asking yourself: How could someone think it was a good idea for the plot of a Christmas movie to revolve around the government shutting down an American military base in Guam? Even more bafflingly, the base's marquee humanitarian effort is a yearly distribution of gifts to local children. It's like watching propaganda from the Taft administration.
Then, there's my personal favorite: "A Christmas Prince," which is definitely different from the 25 other films with some variation of Christmas and prince in the title. In it, a junior copy editor with no reporting experience is sent overseas to cover a huge royal wedding. Once there, she goes "undercover" by pretending to be the princess's private tutor, like some kind of royalty-obsessed Project Veritas. Does the fake nation's fake Secret Service notice an interloper who can barely do math suddenly has intimate access to the monarchy? (They don't.) Does this "reporter" write the words, "I think I'm finally getting to know the real prince ... so not what I thought!" in a Word doc? (So help me god, she does.)
I enjoy prestige TV as much as the next coastal elite, but if there's anything we need right now, it's to gently lower the volume of the screams in our heads. And there's nothing that does it quite like a holiday romance. So turn off your brain and grab a drink and your most cynical friend. Before you know it, the world will melt away, and you'll be screaming at the screen about the nonsensical rules of a made-up land's hereditary government, which, when you think about it, is about as festive as a 2020 holiday season has any right to be.
