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| Creepy Christmas critters compel you to watch non-stop holiday-themed specials |
ABC Family airs its corporate hamfast, 25 Days of Christmas, every December. To ease the fretful nerves of holiday-addicts, they even have a pre-countdown countdown, Countdown to 25 Days of Christmas (my redundancy nowhere near matches theirs.) If you need a fix that can’t be soothed by old classics – if you need something new, artificial with Christian platitudes intact – ABC Family has your back.
Disney understands its market. It knows how to manipulate traditional values into palatable family fun with high profit returns. And, as ABC Family is owned by Disney, they follow the family-fun exploitation model ardently.
Most of the specials they air have just been derivative rom-coms, but they have also are comfortable exposing embarrassing sequels to Rankin-Bass movies to the public. No, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer did not need to be revisited in lazy 3-D animation. It already had two sequels, anyway. We don’t need Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys. We don’t need to check back in with Rudolph unless he and Hermey are entering a domestic partnership and challenging Santa’s Judeo-Christian approach to distributing goods to minors of the world.
On top of a continuous mind-melting block packed with classics reruns, jingle bells, stop-motion ice monsters and family weeping around indoor trees – ABC family also produces its own new specials yearly with C-actors (or used-to-be-almost-an-A-actor).
For whatever reason, they try mainly to appeal to an older age bracket with contrived romantic narratives. So we get the same poke-your-eyes-out story about a woman whose main concept of success is wrapped up in pursuing romantic love with a dude. And it’s called a Christmas special because mistletoe and other thematic flourishes are thrown in.
In the 12 Dates of Christmas we follow Kate Stanton (Amy Smart) as she relives the same day over and over. A holiday movie about a person inexplicably repeating their day over and ultimately learning a profound lesson about life – surely not a rip-off of anything. So, why Kate’s counterpart in Groundhog’s Day goes through stages of acceptance that mirrors philosophical growth and an acceptance of the complexities of life and what we owe the world – Kate in The 12 Dates of Christmas just really really wants to not be alone. While annoyed that she is stuck on Christmas Eve over and over again Kate doesn’t spend a lot of time considering her situation. She does sigh a lot – and even more than sigh, she looks longingly at a strong-jawed fellow while blinking glassy eyes.
Desperately Seeking Santatried on the workaholic-woman-chooses-man-over-job trope. Jennifer Walker (Laura Vandervoort) is ambitious, but always with a sad faraway look in her eye. She’s not sure what she’s missing, but we know. To be complete, she needs a tender, but still macho, dude to romance her and restore her Christmas faith. Her job almost destroys the family business of her love interest. Don’t worry folks. She gives a speech about goodness to her money-hungry boss, shuns a promotion and rushes to the arms of hunky sensitive sexy-Santa. Of course, she’s decrying capitalist morality while being in a movie that was packaged efficiently and cheaply to make some quick bucks for ABC Family.
ABC Family is just a part of the consumerist holiday problem. They’re just playing into an existing formula that has already been embedded into our culture. But, they do it really well. And really bad.