Hallmark EVP Lisa Hamilton Daly Draws Inspiration from ‘Only Murders in the Building,’ Remains Unconcerned with GAC Threat: “Their Ratings Speak for Themselves”

A Hallmark movie isn’t always a Hallmark movie. Y’know how all tissues are Kleenex, any photocopier is a Xerox machine, and Google just means “search” at this point? When it comes to holiday entertainment, Hallmark is just as dominant as Jacuzzi (well, when it comes to hot tubs). It doesn’t matter if a holiday movie was made for VOD, Lifetime, or Netflix. If you’re describing that movie to a friend, you’re probably going to call it a Hallmark movie.

That’s because “Hallmark movie” has become synonymous with a vibe and story structure that is easily Xeroxed: drop someone from the city into a small town, throw in a small business that needs saving, an angry CEO who only appears during phone call scenes, a goofy best friend, a dead parent, a near miss kiss under the mistletoe, lots of rights-free Christmas tunes, an impossible amount of backstory, and a minimum of one (1) sitcom actor from the ’80s or ’90s and ho ho ho, you have a Hallmark movie.

But what if a Hallmark movie isn’t a Hallmark movie? That was the unspoken theme of Hallmark’s 2022 Countdown to Christmas lineup. Week after week, the network known for its dependable predictability kept defying expectations by airing holiday movies about spies, brothers, and influencers. There was a gay romcom, a period piece and a few legitimately hilarious comedies. While other networks were making Hallmark movies, Hallmark was making major moves to diversify their output and expand their audience.

That’s all part of Lisa Hamilton Daly’s sweeping vision as EVP of programming for Hallmark Media. After a stint at Netflix developing Hallmark-style content like Virgin River and Sweet Magnolias, Daly now brings a modern sensibility to Hallmark proper. That includes a forward-facing slate of holiday movies as well as high-concept new programs, like the time travel family drama The Way Home. .

In this interview with Decider, Daly lays out the new modus operandi for Hallmark’s increasingly daring — but still TV-G! — movies, previews the network’s year round schedule of stunt programming, and addresses the controversies that dragged family friendly holiday movies the larger culture war.

---

DECIDER: I reviewed 13 Hallmark holiday movies last season and, if I can be honest, it felt like such a lightyear beyond previous years in terms of quality. You started at Hallmark in September 2021, so was 2022 your first real holiday movie season?

Lisa Hamilton Daly: The last Christmas [2021] was a little baked when I got here, so I didn’t have much influence over it. This Christmas [2022] was the Christmas that I worked on. Obviously the team had some of this stuff sitting there, but a lot of what I’ve been doing since I got here is giving people permission. That’s a really talented team and I think they felt like we have a core audience who loves what we do, but you’re eventually just doing a version of the same movie over and over again. You want to break out and do something different once in a while. We’re really cognizant of the fact that we want to keep our longtime fans happy, but they actually seem to love the new stuff we did. We’re also saying, “Who else is out there that might want to watch this?” Our goal is to really bring everybody into the room with us and I was really proud of how the team stepped up.

We were really surprised by how well comedies — like straight-up comedies — did for us this year. My daughter, who’s 12, watched Haul Out the Holly approximately 15 times. I’ve now seen it a lot because it was running nonstop in the back of my house. She’s a huge Lacey [Chabert] fan. She’s not in the demo but she’s engaged in it genuinely. I heard that from a lot of people, just in a totally anecdotal way — that people’s husbands were interested and their kids were watching. So we opened up to more non-ladies-25-to-50. We really were trying to grab that bigger audience and I think we succeeded. I was really thrilled with how that all went and the different types of storylines — like Ghosts of Christmas Always was a fun, cool, different thing, and when we made it I was like, “Well, I hope it works. I hope people like it.” And turns out they did, and it’s exciting to see that.

When you have 40 slots to fill in a movie schedule every year, how do you choose what gets made? Is it like, “We’re going to do X number of traditional, business-woman-goes-back-to-small-town movies,” or…?

We have a little bit of a mathematical formula of how much [we make] of each, and I’m not gonna lie: sometimes it’s like, “That one’s ready.” With the incredible volume that we do, you have to love the one you’re with. But I have to shout out to our head of our holiday team, Samantha DiPippo. She’s our SVP who runs that division. She was very careful to think about what else we can be doing. And we did try to take some flyers, but we also do want to have the stuff that feels familiar and fun to people. That’s that comfort watch. So, we’re looking for a mix.

This coming Christmas, we’re continuing to refine that mix, and how it even plays out through the three nights of the weekend. We’re thinking about what’s great for Friday nights, what really works for Saturday nights, and what works for Sunday nights, and we’re we’re thinking about how that cadence works because they do feel like different nights: like Friday night’s the traditional comfort watch; Saturday night might be our big tentpole night; and Sunday might be that thing we’re trying that’s a little different. That’s what we think that the weekends feel like, but we’re still in the very early stages of thinking about how it’s gonna work out.

There’s a roster of talent that Hallmark is cultivating, not only onscreen but behind-the-scenes — like actors Paul Campbell and Kimberly Sustad writing Three Wise Men and a Baby. When does a Hallmark actor go from just acting to being the director or writer, too?

If you’re funny and you can write, maybe you get to write! Paul and Kim have a voice, and they had been doing stuff together for a while. We definitely are leaning into the talent that we have. We also have a lot of writers who write for us over and over again, who we know we can go to. So it’s not even just the on-screen talent, but a lot of our offscreen talent — our writers, our directors, our producers — some of them only work for Hallmark. Over the last few years, the reins have started to loosen a little bit. We have given all of those people more leeway, and that’s why what’s coming back is so great. They were willing to write within what we wanted. We’re still working inside of mostly G ratings, we’re working inside a focus on love and connection and family, and different holiday traditions. We’re giving people more latitude. We’re saying, “Tell us the show you really want to make” and what we’re getting back is some really creative stuff. And those people have been waiting to do this for a little while, so a lot of the same writers who we worked with for years are just having fun. They’re getting to do all kinds of fun stuff.

A movie like The Holiday Sitter, that is a very traditional Hallmark movie but it’s a gay love story. Hallmark is finding ways to take the format but make it feel fresh.

That was a very deliberate decision on Jonathan Bennett’s part. Jonathan really had a lot to do with the creation and the curation of that movie, and he was very clear that he wanted to make a traditional holiday movie that just so happened to have two men at the center of it. We think that that makes it more accessible for a lot of people. It’s not too many hats, right? The buy in is it’s a love story, and people people responded well and they loved it. Jonathan has such positive associations for our audience, and has been a star here for a while, and for him to do that was really exciting — and there’s more in the pipeline.

The big story of the 2022 holiday movie season was the unexpected “culture war” aspect, with lots of focus on who was and wasn’t defecting to Great American Family and stars calling out other stars. There was a lot of noise from other networks, but Hallmark seemed to fly above all of it.

I will call out the PR team as really expertly guiding us through that, because I think another channel was seeking to define themselves as against us. That’s what they needed to get press. And we just decided, this is not our story. This is their story, and whatever they’re doing — they’re shadowboxing at this point, I don’t know. Our stars tried to not speak out too much. We really tried to stay out of that and do our thing because I don’t think we want to be defined against anybody else. We wanted to define ourselves on our own terms, and we wanted to let our our programming speak for itself about where we sat in that debate. And I think we did.

That’s what blew my mind because Hallmark is still making G-rated movies.

No, you would have thought we were making I-don’t-know-what over here. It’s still a lovely chaste kiss at the end of these things. What do you think we’re doing? I also have to say that I think that their ratings speak for themselves. Do people really want everything to be so negative and exclusionary? It appears not.

There’s also a difference between what is said on Twitter or in interviews, and then there is the real world. Social media represents such a small fraction of the audience. Having access to the full gamut of reactions, what did you learn about what the audience wants?

I think the biggest takeaway for me last year was that our audiences want more comedy, and that may speak to the moment we’re in. People just want to escape and laugh, and that was a genre that we hadn’t given them before. We’d always gone up to the edge of full comedy, and we call them romcoms but they were mostly comedies in that they ended in marriage, that very classic sense of a comedy. And I’ll note that neither of our comedies actually ended in marriage. They were literally comedies in that they were funny, and I think that’s what people wanted. I don’t think people want to engage in scrappy culture wars. They want to just be entertained. They want to escape a little bit, and that’s what what we gave them.

When these risks pay off, how does that inform what comes next?

We’re definitely taking our learnings from this last year and moving forward, and I can’t really say more than that. One of the few things that we announced for next year is A Biltmore Christmas. That one we shot down at the Biltmore in North Carolina. I went down to visit the set and it has period flashbacks that are absolutely gorgeous. It’s a little more in line of A Holiday Spectacular. That one was so lovely for us. It did nice numbers. We’re looking at having that diversity of content because we don’t want to give people necessarily the same thing every week.

After the holiday season, Hallmark launched a new drama series — The Way Home. To be honest, I’d never watched Hallmark programming outside of Countdown to Christmas, and The Way Home was nothing like what I assumed it would be. It felt like it could be a Netflix original.

I’ll tell you a little secret — well, it’s not even secret. I brought that with me. I was at Netflix previously and I developed that there. I have been in love with that show ever since it was pitched to me at lunch one day and the team and everybody did an incredible job bringing it to life. It only gets better. Stuff gets mind blowing by the end, so I’m really excited that people are loving it.

We have another amazing series coming behind it, Ride, which has hot cowboys, so, I’m very excited for that. It’s different from The Way Home but it is another family story that is told in the sweeping vistas of the West and it’s a little soapier, I would say. There’s some mystery. And then we have the return of our beloved When Calls the Heart. We have a new showrunner [Lindsay Sturman] and I think she’s doing amazing things there and really elevating that show, and that has a very passionate fanbase.

We are leaning into our seasonal stunts because of the success of Christmas and holiday time. It’s fun to have something thematically linked. Nobody else does it. I think fall is such a thing, so I was like, “Let’s do more fall stuff.” We had a movie called Pumpkin Everything last year and I was like, “There has to be a Pumpkin Everything every year, and we’ll call it something else.” We have a summer theme which, last year, was travel. We had something set in Belize and something set in France and something set in Hawaii. This year we’re working with weddings and different cultures, which is exciting. Everybody loves a wedding. We have Loveuary which started with Sweeter than Chocolate which I thought is just a lovely movie and we have some some really fun movies in that stunt. Being a little thematic is how we’re keeping people engaged.

And then on our other channel, which is Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, we are leaning back more into the mysteries, which people really liked. We’re trying to bring back the fan favorites but also freshen them up because — I loved Only Murders in the Building, so we are trying to see how we can feel more modern with our mysteries.

There’s a real resurgence in mysteries now too thanks to Glass Onion on Netflix and Poker Face on Peacock.

I just started that, by the way, so I gotta get further into it because I love Natasha Lyonne. She’s amazing. I think with our mysteries, it can be a little bit of a dusty attic kind of show but we’re saying, “Okay, how do we do something — which still has to be G-rated, PG maybe, especially if it’s murder — but how do we do what works for our audience but is also fresh?” And that’s what we’re trying and I think that there’s going to be some fun surprises with that, too.

Hallmark also has a new deal with Peacock, wherein subscribers can watch Hallmark’s channels live and have access to new and classic titles on-demand. How is that working out so far?

I think what it is giving us is exposure to more people, and that’s really interesting. We don’t have a lot of data on on viewership yet. I’m really looking forward to seeing what that looks like because there’s a wider audience there that’s coming in for our stuff, is what I understand. I can’t say too much because we don’t know that much yet. It’s still very early days. But it is exciting because the series get stacked. You can also, by the way, catch them on the fourth day on Hallmark Movies Now. Our SVOD has them stacked there too. There’s multiple ways to catch up. And we have a new head of [streaming and digital platforms, Emily Powers] who’s coming in to look at how that SVOD universe is going to work. I think that’ll become an even more compelling destination.

How do you see Hallmark’s reputation as having changed over the last few years?

I work in Hollywood and I’m getting feedback from the community that it feels different to work here. What the output is feels different. We’ve attracted a lot of new creative partners who would never have [previously worked with Hallmark]. I literally had a conversation today about an A-list actress who might want to come do a Hall of Fame [movie] with us. I think Hallmark was always beloved, but it’s expanded its audience, it’s expanded what it’s doing, and I think it’s just on a roll right now.