Netflix Needs to Do Even More Holiday Specials

I love Christmas episodes. I love Christmas episodes so much that I’ve written 50 blurbs about 50 of the best ones between this year and last year. I’m still bummed out that Parks and Recreation never produced a truly great Christmas tale, and I’m unreasonably excited that the Full House saga has given us holiday specials that span 30 years. Like I said, I love Christmas episodes. But I’ve long been worried about the future of the Christmas episode as TV shows move away from weekly releases and the traditional fall-to-spring scheduling. The all-at-once season dump pioneered by Netflix and now practiced by Hulu, Prime Video, and most other streaming services (and even some cable networks via on-demand!) is great for binge-watching and instant gratification and not so great if you love getting the gift of a holiday episode.

That’s because when a season drops all at once, or airs a short season anytime other than December, doing a Christmas episode just feels off. Christmas episodes make sense with the TV format we’ve known for the last, I dunno, 60 years, which allows us to follow the lives of our favorite characters nearly in real-time, week after week. And when December rolled around for us, it also rolled around for the Tanner family and the friends at Central Perk and the students of Bayside High and the employees of WNYX and the regulars at Cheers. If a show consistently releases a whole season all at once in January (like Netflix’s Grace and Frankie or One Day at a Time), then when will they ever get a chance to do a Christmas episode that doesn’t feel anachronistic? Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a show packed with holiday potential, got around this by having Kimmy work at a year-round Christmas store. But come on, don’t you want to see Titus record a Christmas single and watch Jacqueline get visited by three ghosts? I have been worried about this lack of Christmas content for a long time–seriously, this was the subject of the first article I ever wrote for Decider.

Two years later I’m pleased to say that it looks like Netflix has figured out a way to have their all-episodes-at-once cake and eat it at Christmas too. They released a bunch of new Christmas movies and they also dropped seasonal seasons of the The Great British Baking Show and its unofficial comedy counterpart Nailed It! We got another season of Fuller House and since the whole thing dropped in mid-December, the very first episode was a Christmas extravaganza. And–in a real heartening move–they released Christmas specials for Netflix originals both imported (Free Rein: The 12 Neighs of Christmas) and domestic (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina).

But it’s the Sabrina special that really impressed me, not just because it’s a potent concoction of seasonal ingredients ranging from the spooky to the merry. The CAoS special proved something very important to my festive self; it proved that Netflix does have a strategy for releasing standalone Christmas episodes for their original series. Unlike the Free Rein or BoJack Horseman specials, which exist as their own entries separate from the main series, Sabrina’s Christmas adventure is nestled right there in the episode lineup alongside the rest of Season 1.

That’s important, at least to a TV traditionalist like myself, one constantly struggling to figure out what the F is going on in the 21st century! It’s true that I just want Christmas episodes in any way possible. I need to see the show’s resident Scrooge get taught a lesson. I want to see the cast band together to make Christmas happen in an empty diner or stalled subway car. I’m totally cool if that means we get a standalone special, but I also think it’s great if episodes are integral to the overall series and are situated right there in the running order.

Now that Netflix has finally figured out how to make Christmas cheer streamable at the exact right time, I want them to go all out for 2019. We need a One Day at a Time episode where the Alvarez family celebrates a multigenerational and multicultural Christmas. A Queer Eye Christmas has a nice ring to it, so I want to see the Fab Five make over a small-town mall Santa and help him treat the Mrs. Claus in his life. Grace and Frankie is begging–begging!–for a holiday episode that drops Grace in Frankie’s hippie Hanukkah and Frankie in Grace’s totally luxe Christmas. Don’t you want to see what antics the girls of GLOW get up to when it comes time to shoot the show-within-a-show’s raucous holiday spectacular? And even if Kimmy Schmidt is wrapping up next month, a festive reunion special would be next year’s real Christmas miracle.

Y’know what? In the spirit of a Christmas episode, I’ll close out with a song.

I don’t want a lot for Christmas
There’s just one thing I need
I don’t care about the dramas
That you want me to stream
I just want new Christmas shows
More than you could ever know
Make my streams come true
Netflix, all I want for Christmas is you

Stream Chilling Adventures of Sabrina "A Midwinter's Tale" on Netflix

Stream Nailed It! Holiday! on Netflix