Stream It or Skip It: ‘Dear Christmas’ on Lifetime Stars Melissa Joan Hart as America’s #1 Podcaster

Melissa Joan Hart and Jason Priestley star in Lifetime’s Dear Christmas, a holiday romcom about a podcaster having some will she/won’t she flirtation with a tow truck driver. Hart is a Christmas romcom all-star ever since the iconic Holiday in Handcuffs aired in 2007, but does Dear Christmas live up to her legacy? Or should you just skip this one and rewatch Lifetime’s Feliz NaviDAD instead?

DEAR CHRISTMAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Melissa Joan Hart plays Natalie Morgan, the most successful podcaster in America! Her podcast—which is either named Holiday Love or Dear Christmas, it alternates…except maybe it doesn’t?—is all about romance. However, the host has one big secret: she’s never really been in love herself! For Christmas, Natalie’s taking her podcast out of a studio in Chicago and back to her hometown near Lake Tahoe for a special livestream event. And if you thought Natalie could road trip from Chicago to Lake Tahoe without breaking down and needing some roadside assistance, you’ve never seen one of these movies! That’s where she meets a hunky tow truck driver with the nickname Mr. Christmas (but not Netflix’s Mr. Christmas) played by Jason Priestley. His truck is done up in Christmas lights and you bet he has a thermos full of hot cocoa waiting in his cup holder. She’s not seen the last of Mr. Christmas!

Natalie finally makes it to her parents’ house, where her very pregnant sister (Nicki Whelan) is waiting to give birth to a basketball, it looks like. Natalie’s parents (Ed Begley Jr. and Faith Prince) are eager for their daughter to find love, which is maybe why they keep hiring Mr. Christmas—whose real name is Chris Massey, like Christmas-y!—to do everything from decorating to catering. Natalie and Chris realize they have a lot more in common than her meddling parents. They actually went to school together in the 8th grade! Wow, is there history here? Is this fate? Could Natalie score the biggest win of her career and fall in live for the first time just in time for her holiday romance podcast livestream?!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is about as straightforward as it gets when it comes to holiday romcoms, from its hilariously vague understanding of a modern trend like podcasting (similar to On the 12th Date of Christmas‘ bizarre grasp on… the adult scavenger hunt industry) to its unwavering devotion to small businesses (as seen on Christmas Tree Lane this year).

Performance Worth Watching: Here’s the tea: aside from the video testimonials from “real couples” that Natalie watches throughout, there are only six speaking roles in the whole movie. Natalie, Chris, her parents, her sister, and her boss, a podcasting mogul played by Robin Givens. That’s it. So with very little competition, I have to give this to mom (Faith Prince) and dad (Ed Begley Jr.), who are so thoroughly pleasant that you don’t really mind them low-key hounding their daughter to get hitched already.

Memorable Dialogue: And the Steve Buscemi award for Outstanding Use of Hip Slang goes to the line, “Penny called: the podcast has already gone viral.”

A Holiday Tradition: In addition to decking the halls something fierce, the Morgan family throws an epic ugly Christmas sweater party every single year that everyone looks forward to and definitely attends.

Does the Title Make Any Sense?: It does not—not even within the context of the movie! The movie is named after Natalie’s podcast, but I honestly don’t know what the name of her podcast is. In the first second, Natalie talks to the listeners of Dear Christmas while there’s a visible poster for Holiday Love over her shoulder. Later we find out that episodes of her podcast have been collected into a bestselling book (?) called, you guessed it, Holiday Love. But just when you think the podcast is actually titled Holiday Love, Natalie or someone else calls it Dear Christmas—which is the name of the movie! I think the movie is trying to tell us that the podcast’s name is Holiday Love and Natalie’s doing a limited series within that podcast called Dear Christmas—which is honestly too complicated for a holiday romcom!

Our Take: Look: what the cable networks have managed to pull off this holiday season in the middle of a catastrophic pandemic is really commendable. We really, really need these movies as an escape in 2020, and I am sincerely thankful for all of the hard work—and lives safely put on/near the line—that went into keeping this tradition alive and giving all of us some much needed basic cable joy every night.

So this context, the limited resources and last minute scrambling that the cast and crews of 70 movies had to deal with in order to deliver by Christmas, is what you have to keep in mind when trying to enjoy Dear Christmas. And that’s where—despite a perfect cast of professionals who are such a joy to watch—even this movie falls short.

The problem with Dear Christmas is that it’s a perfectly pleasant by-the-numbers holiday romcom—which we love!—that is totally hindered by the moment it was filmed during, the moment we’re still enduring. Dear Christmas has no fewer than three scenes set at holiday parties that are literally happening off camera because of social distancing. There’s a shopping trip with no montage. There’s a restaurant singalong that takes place before the restaurant opens, with just Chris and Natalie. There’s a pregnant wife with no husband because his character keeps getting delayed at the airport (a.k.a. keeping the cast small). The most glaring omission of all is the ugly Christmas sweater party, which the movie keeps building up to. When it arrives, Natalie and Chris head outside to make s’mores while the party rages indoors—and then Natalie’s sweater is crowned the winner by an offscreen voice after a contest we don’t see. To give praise where it’s due, it actually is an ugly Christmas sweater, comically uglier than any worn in Hallmark’s Never Kiss a Man in a Christmas Sweater.

With all the implied hustle and bustle of the holiday season happening just over there, Dear Christmas keeps unintentionally reminding you that this holiday season is a bummer. This is a big surprise because that’s not been the case with any other Lifetime or Hallmark movie this year, movies that presumably filmed under the same restrictions. That goes for the absolutely delightful Feliz NaviDAD, which Melissa Joan Hart directed. The pandemic has impacted all of these movies, don’t get me wrong. The casts are smaller than usual. There a lot of supporting roles filled with people that were already inside a cast or crew members’ bubble. You can even notice smaller things, like how characters are sitting further apart from each other or how the over-the-shoulder shots are staged so that the six foot gulf between the leads appears shorter. But those restrictions—which are 100% necessary and done to keep all these creators safe!—have never felt so noticeable and plentiful as they do in Dear Christmas.

It’s really a shame, because you really shouldn’t be able to go wrong with Melissa Joan Hart and Jason Priestley. They’re super fun to watch and sell some perfectly cheesy one-liners; I genuinely loved Chris telling Natalie “We don’t have a connection”—and he’s talking about the Christmas lights! You know this movie had to undergo a dramatic decluttering in order to get it together for production during COVID, and unfortunately a lot of the things we love about these movies—the big casts and parties and carols and montages—presumably had to be tossed to ensure a safe production. I’m glad they were, because safety is more important than a scene on Main Street U.S.A. I just wish there had been another, smaller script ready to go for Hart and Priestley to star in.

Our Call: SKIP IT. I sincerely would love to see the original plan for Dear Christmas filmed for a future Lifetime movie, whenever things are as back to normal as they can be—and maybe that movie can be called Holiday Love.

Watch Dear Christmas on Lifetime