We’re All in the Snowglobe, Now

Following Donald Trump’s 2016 election, my friend and fellow writer David Roth and I were stuck for a podcast idea. We wanted to talk about something that avoided the psychological effects of our regular gigs: hooking our faces to the daily firehose of bad news and producing syntheses that functioned as magnets for harassment. We wanted to talk about a world where nothing bad ever happens. We wound up (gently) goofing on Hallmark movies. Then the real world came for us anyway.

After roughly 150 episodes of our show, Hallmark movies are no longer siloed from the mainstream as a senior curio, but have steadily seeped into it. Just as the movies have evolved to embrace more diversity and “impure” cultural reality (gay couples, once impossible to find in the older, hokier, more provincial films, are now presented as a matter of course, even if not yet common lead material), the culture already completed its cycle from ironic fascination to general acceptance. They are familiar enough to have earned parodies from countless bloggers, “SNL” and “The Simpsons.” People who normally argue with us about Hakeem Jeffries’ approval ratings or Francisco Lindor’s 2026 projections will, in the next tweet, ask us if we noticed a bewilderingly unappetizing step pyramid of extruded pastry in the background of a 2017 movie called “The 12 Santas of Christmas.”

What began as a refuge from the discourse has come to feel, a little more each year, like the rest of you are locked in here with us. These little filmic snowglobes of Hallmark world, gilt and hermetic and utterly unreal, have enough room for both the real America and fictionalized “Real America” lost to nostalgia and what-if. I’m sorry to tell you that the Trump administration’s stuck in here, too. 

Hallmark movies were never apolitical, of course. Their politics were passive — begged questions rather than active assertions — and built on half a century of recycling postwar Boomer Americana without acknowledging or wrestling with the social forces that shaped it. Every aspect of their version of classic America — anti-city, pro-marriage, white, Christian-coded, wraparound porches and parks teeming with gazebos, women whose jobs effectively amount to “professional mom,” etc. — represented another implicitly conservative political choice. While Hallmark’s parent company, Crown Media, studiously eschewed the stridency and advocacy of something like Fox News, it nevertheless wound up constructing the world that Fox pretends all of America once was and can return to.

Then three things came for Hallmark at once. (No myrrh was involved.)

While Hallmark movies do not build on each other to create a canonical universe like Star Wars or the Marvel EU, they do form an integrated, internally consistent alternative America that was destined, in its confidence, to draw interest from outside the channel’s core demographic. Anything that celebrates its own irrepressible selfness so much as to merit mainstream parody has its own kind of magnetism. A survey of people in your life who enjoy a Hallmark movie now and again will turn up plenty of people far too young to have any personal experience with the source material for its original brand of nostalgia. It turns out that movies where nothing bad happens — and, quite frequently, effectively nothing happens at all — appeal quite a bit to people of color, LGBTQ+ Americans and anyone not nostalgia-maxing a pre-Civil Rights Era real America that tens of millions of people were violently prevented from participating in.

The second issue facing Crown Media was part of a larger crisis for conservative media: The core demographic was lily white in a diversifying country, not to mention the one that dies soonest. Just as younger and non-white people were discovering Hallmark’s holiday hegemony by a kind of social media osmosis, in 2019 a controversy erupted about ads featuring a lesbian couple’s wedding that presented something like a fork in the road. Rather than going the private equity route and wringing a last buck out of dead viewers’ bones, Crown began a tentative walk toward meeting the mainstream halfway, starting with hesitant jokes, then slowly diversifying characters higher and higher up the bill. You can almost peg a movie’s production period depending on whether the gay character is obviously closeted, a sibling, a sibling in a relationship or just someone who’s allowed to be gay without the plot seeming as if it needs to explain why everyone else knows them. They still have a long way to go, but the process has been like watching the Trump administration’s war on DEI on rewind. 

Hallmark suddenly began making movies with two Black leads, a major departure from movies with none at all. There are Hanukkah movies every year now, and it’s a little heartwarming how Jewish cultural signifiers have been so rapidly absorbed into (and a little flattened by) the Hallmark process, yielding a similar plot-beat checklist. Single adult parents were finally allowed the dignity of being divorced and normal about it rather than having to be widows or widowers in a realm that has never known another way of ending a marriage. Rather than fleeing reality, the network began making movies that served as models of empathetic behavior during new or difficult circumstances. The default Trumpian attitude toward cities as unacknowledged hellholes eroded, making way for young characters who don’t have to run home to find happiness. Crown even demonstrated enough confidence in the Hallmark canon to let writers, directors and actors tease, parody and kid the material. Despite the jokes, their values spoke for themselves. Doubtless the Hallmark stable of writers that built their version of America welcomed the vindication of the old liberal argument about the real one: You can kid something, lampoon it and even think it’s a little bit silly or mistaken, and yet still love it and its highest ambitions with every bit of your heart.

Not everyone or every part of Crown Media made the transition, and thankfully no one has pledged to compromise the channel’s new direction to win them back. Former president and CEO Bill Abbott, the man more responsible than anyone for Hallmark Christmas movies’ pod-people era — all-white former child stars leadenly piloting dullard characters through 78 minutes of sexless, unfunny rom-com Stations of the Cross and refusing to fall in love for inane reasons bordering on psychosis — decamped to the Great American Family channel to recreate the magic. Evidently for him and some viewers, a Hallmark that posited the existence of gay people was a woke bridge too far, and Great American Family immediately set out to relaunch the careers of people whose husbands can’t watch them kiss other actors on screen and whine about needing a safe space for Christian-friendly media. Today, at the height of the Countdown to Christmas season, Great American Family averages about 11,000 viewers in the prime-time 25-54 demo. This is roughly 0.1% of the population of the original Hallmark universe’s dreaded New York metropolitan region.

Part of the problem for Great American Family — as for Hallmark, which reduced its slate of new movies for 2025 from north of 40 to around 25 — is glut. The formula worked so well that everyone tried their version of it, and they continue chasing it even after the numbers have peaked. The bases are covered. If Hallmark is the safe channel, then Lifetime is the slightly dangerous one that mother warned you about. Netflix and Prime offer Hallmark with an upscale budget; Roku has Joey from New Kids on the Block for some reason. Despite the variety, they all feel a little like when a restaurant makes its own ketchup, or when someone tries to launch a new alternative to Coca-Cola. Yeah, OK. Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas continues to dominate the TV attention economy in a way that few things outside of live sports do anymore. They not only beat Great American, they beat CNN and MSNBC. 

That dominance may be owed to the third and final factor that began impressing itself on the Hallmark universe toward the end of Trump’s first term: the president himself. The increasingly explicit premise of that first term, and the violent daily reality of the second, provide a demonstration of an attempt to break real Americans in a demonic version of the Hallmark machine. Living in the implicit political realities of the Hallmark Uncanny Valley is pleasant as a little visit, a thought experiment, an alternative. It is not meant to be real or mandatory.

The rat king of Trump officials would hate it if you explained it to them, but their project is, at heart, an exercise in the postmodern concept of hauntology — the nostalgia for lost futures. The MAGA project is about the restoration of a lost America, and the only debate concerns how many years of the “real” America have been lost. The most petulant, if facetious, expression of this kind of thinking is the line from an old TV ad: “They promised us flying cars!” The most toxic comes in the form of Trump administration posts on Twitter, accompanied by an AI-generated image of American symbols run through a “Nazi eugenics poster” filter. This volkischer dreamland is what we could have had, if the wrong people hadn’t been included — an America without good ethnic food, Stax, Motown and abundant internet nudity.

Hallmark’s nostalgia, like America’s, is not the exclusive domain of those privileged to have enjoyed the real thing before it became our posterity. The false memory of an American golden age is tarnished by the violent hypocrisy of a nation founded on an unmet promise, but we were all steeped in its 20th century nostalgia. Bing Crosby remains the background music to Christmas even if we look nothing like him, and we’ve spent a Christmas Eve with George Bailey in Bedford Falls, even if all we do with this patrimony is digest and reproduce it as camp or irony or critique. Each is a response to a text we share as America’s children.

In a peculiar bit of timing, the Trump administration seeded the promise of dragging America atavistically back to a fictional, segregated postwar idyll, just as Hallmark — the network that most vividly relied on and celebrated the tropes of that America — began expanding its horizons. Crown Media is still in the business of nostalgia, but it is no longer an exclusive one. This was a necessary demographic adjustment in the post-Abbott era, and a recognition that you can’t provide a pleasant alternative to an ugly zeitgeist while representing a filmed proof of concept for its end goal. People want to take time during a specific part of the year to fondly remember feeling loved and secure in a place where they belong. They don’t need to be white or from a town whose name ends in “Falls” to do it, no matter what Christmas morning’s executive order on Truth Social says. They do need to have something on TV while they do laundry or miss feeling Christmasy.

MAGA’s fundamental error is mistaking the cast for the plot. The point of Christmas, and the heart of the holiday film, is the expression and appreciation of community, of family, of goodwill and charity. It doesn’t matter who the cast is, because we are all in it, and there’s a role for everyone. (Even if we could stand to work on the cast.) Neither this season nor this nation were promised to only one kind of person. “Nostalgia is a prison” is a saying; making it literal is fascism.