The Sliding Scale of Sapphistry: The Hallmark Hustle

After Love, Classified came out, we chatted about it in LezWatch Slack and people rightly pointed out the shortcomings of a made-for-tv romcom movie:

1. Limited time – Most movies clock in at 120 minutes
2. Simplistic formula – These are all the same flow (meet girl, mess up with girl, get girl)
3. Direct conclusions – Everything always wraps up with a bow

This sadly leads to a feeling that a movie is rushed. You jump from kissing a woman to wearing rainbows and being all-in-queer:

Which prompted me to remark:

If the Hallmark movie does well, though, then we can finish the move from ‘background lesbians at a wedding’ through ‘BFF lesbian with no life’, ‘secondary/not-quite-main character gets a girlfriend,’ to finally “Main character is a lesbian looking for love.” Which given that this is Hallmark’s fifth movie with queers is actually a quick and sane correction.

Which gets us to this post.

Let’s See the List

I’m not kidding about this being Hallmark’s 5th, by the way — excluding the Good Witch (which is a series). It’s also the fifth since 2020. So Hallmark has jumped into the corrections really fast.

In order:

1. Christmas with the Darlings (2020)
2. Wedding Every Weekend (2020)
3. An Unexpected Christmas (2021)
4. Every Time a Bell Rings (2021)
5. Love, Classified (2022)

The first one, if you didn’t know going in there were lesbians, you could easily blink and miss it. The second one, though, was actually a plot point to reflect on the main characters (they went to a wedding every weekend and eventually fell in love), as one of those weddings was for lesbian friends.

We don’t get a character with real ‘meat’ until An Unexpected Christmas, which has a queer who is involved in the plot, but there’s no romance going on until the second movie of 2021, thanks to LezWatch Heroine Ali Liebert.

Show Score Scale

So there has to be a scale, right? There are two. We’ll do scores first.

I am delighted to note that all the movies are between 49 and 60! I’m sad that nothing goes over that. The reason the scores are so high, and why that low one is low, is that most of them have happy endings.

And for a very interesting note, that middle one drops, right? It’s also the first time a queer female had a significant role. Like her role wasn’t “Gay BFF.” Or in her case, “Gay Sister!” While the show is heavily down-checked since she has no gay friends, and no happy ending, it’s also the first holiday season without Bill Abbott, former Hallmark CEO.

Why does that matter?

Remember the Zola wedding add that had two women, and Hallmark pulled it only to restore it a couple days later?

Yeah. That was him. He’s the one who kept it off air.

If An Unexpected Christmas had given us a romance, or a happy ending, it would have been closer to 60.

Sapphic Scale

Okay, now the fun one. Remember we have four points:

1. background lesbians
2. bestie lesbian has no queer friends
3. secondary character gets a girlfriend
4. main character gets a girl as a major plot

To make the scale of any real use, we also want one more:

5. the whole plot is about the queer who has a happy ending

We don’t have that. Yet. So I did a little math, based on what the queers were like and got this:

And in visual format:

The reason I gave Christmas with the Darling a bump there, is that it has a queer BFF who has a plotline (she meets the cute barista). The next two movies don’t really have a queer plotline like that. Every Time A Bell Rings has the problem of disconnected storylines (it feels like the queers aren’t really related to the main plot), and finally Love, Classified has a realistic, if truncated, romance between women and all the mother says is “She’s dating a doctor!?”

Hallmark is Trending Good!

The best news from all this is it looks like Hallmark’s on the gravy train for corrections. A lot of people don’t like these silly romcoms, and that’s totally fair, but so much of middle America does. The people who are watching these may not realize they know gays, or maybe their kids are being ‘forced’ to watch the movie, and suddenly they see themselves.

But next? Hallmark, can you please cast our angel, Ali Liebert, as a queer lady looking for love and have the plot be the family trying to find her the perfect girl?

About Mika A. Epstein

Mika has been deep in fandom since she could say 'Trekkie.' With decades experience in running fansites, developing software, and organizing communities, she's taken on the challenge of delving into the recesses of television for queers long forgotten. Making this site with Tracy is nothing short of serendipity. Mika lives with her wife in Southern California. Of course she has a hybrid, but she'd rather ride her bicycle.

 Read all 474 articles by Mika A. Epstein.

 Favorite Shows: A League of Their Own, Batwoman, One Day at a Time, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Willow, Xena: Warrior Princess