If you, too, have spent the holiday season looking for a gentle, wholesome show that also looks as though it might turn into jolly gay porn at literally any moment, I have located that show and it is called “Finding Mr. Christmas.”
In this viewing experience, which has been quietly airing on Hallmark since October (all of you are fired for not telling me) and whose season finale premieres Monday, 10 grown adult men arrive at a holiday chalet and compete to be the romantic lead of an upcoming Hallmark movie. They all have names such as “Jake,” “Drake” and “like Justin, but with an ‘R.’”
Justir.
Jurtin.
Just kidding, it is “Rustin,” who quickly becomes a judge favorite, and my editor and I proceeded to spend the next seven episodes debating whether Rustin actually has too much sex appeal to be a Hallmark leading male. Please leave your opinion in the comments.
In every episode, this crew of walking Hair Cuttery ads + Rusrin, who looks like a pirate, undergo a “festive face-off,” which is a challenge in which they do something like navigate a Christmas obstacle course, or “put a unique spin” on a Santa costume (yes, more than one Santa is shirtless), or dress up as Santa’s reindeer for an aerial photo shoot (yes, more than one reindeer is shirtless), and at one point I left the room to get some pretzels and when I came back they were all shirtless and sweaty and pumping iron in the den together, and I honestly do not know what happened in the 32 seconds I was gone.
“One of you is going to be on top,” host Jonathan Bennett warns them, describing either the judging process or … something else. “And one of you is going to be on the bottom.”
The second half of each episode is an acting challenge, in which each prospective leading man must perform a scene with a Hallmark leading lady/guest judge. As the name of each leading lady is revealed, these buff adult males lose their minds so thoroughly that you start to wonder, Did Joe Rogan change his name to Ashley Williams? But then it turns out, no, Ashley Williams was the likable love interest from 15 episodes of “How I Met Your Mother,” and she is very meaningful to the Hallmark cinematic universe. If Lacey Chabert does not show up in the finale I will riot.
The competitors also lose their minds over the opportunity to decorate gingerbread houses, choose which reindeer they would like to embody and write sentimental letters to their mothers, and this is the point at which you start to think about how fascinating this entire premise is. Not the premise of struggling actors competing to star in a made-for-TV movie — that part makes total sense. Work is work, and if you can get aboard the Hallmark gravy train, you’re 100 percent guaranteed SAG minimums and 80 percent guaranteed that you will not have to play a dumb, sexy snowman come to life in a movie called “Hot Frosty.” Rurtir tells his fellow competitors that this has been an amazing experience because he has learned “there are other people who do get excited about life and want to make cool art.” (On Hallmark.)
What is fascinating about the premise is that it’s television for women about men making television for women. It’s the hosts and judges evaluating, week by week, what makes a man appealing to a likely female Hallmark viewer.
Their judgment was always spot-on in a way that I, a female Hallmark viewer, had been able to sense but not articulate. “It looks like he’s hitting on her, not falling in love with her,” co-host Melissa Peterman whispered to Bennett during one scene, as I struggled to figure out why Rurrir’s performance had suddenly given me the ick. In another episode, the judges quickly determined that the entire reason Craig felt off-putting in an emotional homecoming scene was because he had yelled “Mom” in a way that seemed angry more than urgent.
Boyfriends, are you paying attention to these subtleties? It’s television for women about men making television for women that should really be watched by men. Craig is my pick for the show’s safest winner, by the way. Rurrrr is indeed sexier, but it is my hunch that Hallmark viewers want a hero who is attractive, but not so attractive that a 39-year-old mom who is behind on her salon appointments would feel self-conscious making out with him.
“My friends and family describe me as a golden retriever,” one cute contestant enthusiastically shares. Sir, you have understood the assignment. Say whatever you want about this sappy channel, but no other network in America is working so hard to provide women with examples of the kind of healthy romance where you don’t need to tell your roommate, I’m going out with a new guy, so if I’m not home by midnight he probably murdered me, lol!
What is additionally fascinating is that the longer these gentlemen try to figure out what Hallmark women want, the more they open up about what they want, too.
As they all toss a football around the yard together — an exercise that I can only imagine was concocted by producers trying to get the T-levels of this show back above the X axis — one man (Davey, maybe? I don’t think it was an -ake?) talks about how sports were lifesaving for him. How his friends who stopped playing football went down bad paths. How he wants to raise his son differently and better than he was raised himself. Another contestant, Robbie, who is the only gay man in the group, emotionally responds that sports were always something he was terrible at and excluded from. It feels really good to be here, he says — accepted, included and tossing around a pigskin.
They all root for one another. They are all unbelievably supportive of one another. At one point, a contestant receives immunity from elimination, and he promptly decides to donate it to Robbie, because he wants Robbie to know he is loved.
I had been struggling for weeks to figure out what to write about the Hallmark Channel at Christmas. You cannot think seriously about American culture and ignore it. The network produces dozens of movies every season in a template that is now followed by Lifetime, Netflix, Great American Family. It is our modern Currier and Ives, shaping our understanding of the ideal 21st-century holiday: ugly sweaters, canceled flights, silent nights, he went to Jared.
What Hallmark — and by extension “Finding Mr. Christmas” — gets wrong about Christmas is its sense of how much people love Christmas. No big-city ad exec has a full-time job choosing a single Christmas tree for their skyscraper’s lobby. No small town decides its life purpose is to guard the secret recipe for Nana’s peppermint fudge. The contestants of “Finding Mr. Christmas” have to act like it’s the greatest joy of their lives to climb into giant inflatable beach balls and ecstatically hurl themselves down a hill pretending to be ornaments loosed from a Douglas fir. This is nobody’s greatest joy.
But what Hallmark gets right is that baby, it’s cold outside. It’s hard to be a human in 2025. And if producers can pull together a show in which a bunch of golden retrievers will give you the ugly sweaters off their backs so that they can instead be hoisted, half-nude, into the air with a pulley and pretend to be sexy reindeer while going ape over a lady who starred in “Days of Our Lives” two decades ago, then that — that is the true meaning of Christmas.
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