‘Tis the season for another deluge of made-for-TV movies where a big city career woman finds love in a small town filled with errant gazebos, hundreds of knitted sweaters, and a veritable tsunami of cocoa sipped over heartfelt conversations. You might see some familiar faces, like Lacey Chabert or Candace Cameron Bure, and ultimately, there’ll be a happy ending just in time for Christmas. You love them. We love them. But the holiday romance industry was definitely ripe for parody, and the folks from Family Guy were the right people for the job.
Disney’s Hulu’s Family Guy’s Hallmark Channel’s Lifetime’s Familiar Holiday Movie, a full-length animated feature, takes a shot at every single holiday film ever made. The show does what it does best, not only lampooning the most ridiculous corners of pop culture, like that yearly slog of formulaic holiday movies, but also skewering current events, including how America continues to gloss over and erase its own history of racism, misogyny, and systemic injustice.
In the special, Lois (Alex Borstein) is a single gal from Cityopolis who visits the quaint town of Townsville during Christmas to steal Aunt Maude’s pie recipe for her employer, Carter Pewterschmidt (Seth MacFarlane), the head of Big Pie. While there, she meets mechanic/widow Peter (MacFarlane) in Townsville and falls head over heels in love, despite his girlfriend Bonnie (Jennifer Tilly). However, she soon learns that Peter is the owner and operator of Maude’s Pies. Will their love survive despite her orders to put Aunt Maude’s out of business, while bankrupting the entire town? Will Lois be compelled by the spirit of Christmas and give up her big city ways for small town Peter?
Disney/Hulu
TV Insider sat down with Family Guy showrunners and executive producers Rich Appel and Alec Sulkin to chat about the Family Guy holiday special and dig into exactly why these sugary-sweet, holiday-themed romance movies drew their creative attention this year.
This isn’t the first time you’ve taken a shot at Lifetime and Hallmark-style movies. Why go the feature film route?
Richard Appel: A lack of traditional ideas?
Alec Sulkin: Yes, that is honestly right, a lack of traditional ideas, as Rich said, I think when it comes to making our Christmas episode, we always know we have to come up with some kind of big idea. And it just felt like Lifetime and Hallmark movies have permeated the culture beyond what it used to be, which it felt like it used to be, kind of a niche thing that not a lot of people knew about or watched, and a lot of people ridiculed. And I think that that has changed in the last decade, where now these movies are the norm, and people have them on a loop, starting now. They’re already in their Christmas season. So it feels like the Hallmark/Lifetime Christmas movies kind of took a jump up in our pop culture. And I think it was just a logical thing for us to kind of grab.
Disney/Hulu
Lifetime and Hallmark famously appeal to a very specific demographic. When you were writing this episode, were you parodying the movies or the marketing logic behind them?
Appel: This will sound like a self-serving answer: I don’t think we really ever go after the audience; I think it’s the movie. Look, we’ve fallen back on some storytelling crutches and joke forms a few times, too. Everyone does. So it’s with fondness that we are saying maybe, sometimes, if it ain’t broke, you should still fix it. And maybe the same movie 186 times, you’ve invited a parody. In our room of writers who you might not predict, watch some of these movies, there were more than a few who do, and I think it’s more fun to parody something, of course, that is out in the culture, so that people get it.
Disney/Hulu
Other than a noticeable lack of gazebos, there is also a lack of Chris and Meg in the holiday special. Is there a reason they were left out? Did they just not fit the formula?
Sulkin: I think, honestly, like oftentimes when we do these kinds of bigger idea episodes, it becomes a challenge to service all of our characters, and over the years, we have often made a joke of the fact that we kind of use Meg not as much. Like in our Star Wars episodes. For instance, we had her play like a creature that had no lines, like in each one. So I think with this holiday episode, it just made more sense for Stewie to be the kid. We had that funny little bit with Chris, but yeah, sometimes, there’s not enough real estate, and we’ve got a lot of jokes.
Was there a specific holiday movie that you turned into your template? Was there any one or two movies that inspired you or acted as your template, like a pseudo-Joseph Campbell’s hero journey of campy holiday movies?
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Appel: Well, as is so often the case when it comes to research in the Family Guy writers’ room, it’s a lazy half-reading of Wikipedia entries. We’re not lazy. It’s just that we know the template, where our comedic imagination will take us, and what the story will be. We didn’t want to be tied down to anything specifically, but we knew that once you start with the big pieces of widowed or lonely guy, big town career woman, et cetera, et cetera, then you could just have free rein with the story we wanted to tell.
Did you ask any stars from Hallmark or Lifetime movies to maybe make a cameo? And why did Melissa Joan Hart say no?
Sulkin: No, we have such a talented stable of voice actors who are more than capable of capturing that tone. So I think, no, it didn’t occur to us to go out to Melissa Joan Hart or Dean Cain or whoever stars in a lot of these.
Disney/Hulu
Sulkin: We did get the country music star, Lainey Wilson, to come in and do that theme, which was a really nice, authentic addition. And one of the things I was gonna say about why we can just rely on just our show… we have — over 24 years — populated the town with three dozen known characters. So any type that we want to make fun of as a stereotype, we have a character who could kind of be slotted into that role, which just helps when you do big episodes like this.
Lois gets romantically entangled with Peter after we’ve already been introduced to Bonnie as the existing girlfriend, which feels like a deliberate jab at how Hallmark movies pretend infidelity isn’t happening. Were there other hypocrisies in these films you didn’t have time to point out?
Appel: Well, religion itself is kind of hypocritical.
Sulkin: I think Rich is right. The overarching hypocrisy of American small towns is there, where in these Hallmark/Lifetime movies, we’re sort of forced the buy at the beginning that small town America is better. So it just feels like you can kind of ride that line and make jokes about it on both sides. I don’t know that the cheating thing was really on our radar as a hypocritical Hallmark thing, but it just seemed like there’s always some love triangle, some love complication going on.
Appel: It’s a happy coincidence. I’m glad you noted it.
Fox
And finally: Your film nailed every target it aimed for, including homophobia, corporate America, racism, Flat Earthers, just to name a few. So what is it about Hallmark/Lifetime-style Christmas idealism that makes it such a perfect lens to skewer these cultural issues?
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Appel: Perfection isn’t funny, but pointing out how people and institutions aren’t perfect often is. It’s like, all the more power to those movies because they serve a comforting niche, but Alec was saying, and you know, it’s, they look like movie sets, and it all seems kind of homogenized.
Sulkin: I think the Family Guy writers’ room sees happy and idyllic as sort of a great target.
Appel: That’s a sad but true statement. [Laughs.]
Disney’s Hulu’s Family Guy’s Hallmark Channel’s Lifetime’s Familiar Holiday Movie, Friday, November 28, Hulu
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