First things first: Yes, I’m qualified to review a Hallmark movie. I started watching them in bulk during the first pandemic Christmas, as a kind of soft protest against the onslaught of premium content aimed at telling us what we already know: Life can be pretty bleak sometimes, the rich and powerful always win, yadda yadda. By the time my wife and I finished Ozark, I was searching for something that was both mind-numbingly predictable and relentlessly—almost painfully—positive. (I initially took refuge in Everybody Loves Raymond, but got so fed up with Robert’s lack of a personal life that I decided that, too, was unenjoyable.) No hidden surprises. No character who decides to spiral into some kind of self-destructive behavior. No set of bones being uncovered beneath the floorboards. Just a lot of happy people walking around underneath a blanket of fake snow in some made-up small town where the biggest problem is figuring out how to write a smash holiday song that will save the family jam making business (an actual plot point).
I started breaking down Hallmark favorites on a podcast with friends—some of you may have listened to Around the NFL and now Heed the Call—as a vehicle to talk about my strange hobby, as well as a vehicle to promote the holiday-based charity that I am a board member of called the Greater Newark Holiday Fund (you can learn more about this amazing charity here).
So, needless to say, when the NFL announced a collaboration with the Christmas movie making juggernaut, my antenna was up. I have long been critical of the league’s virus-like ability to creep into all aspects of our lives. Hallmark was a kind of island I felt was safely adrift from my professional life, and now here we have a kind of AI-generated love story built on the foundation of the Kansas City Chiefs–Patrick Mahomes–Travis Kelce–Taylor Swift cultural behemoth; the kind of commercial powder keg that can disrupt the rhythm of familiar sponsors and business partners I have come to love and expect (mostly $1,500 Balsam Hill Christmas trees and Semaglutide pharmaceuticals).
That meant that, for me, Hallmark and the NFL needed to nail this. You don’t come into my dojo, rearrange the furniture, kick dirt all over the place and expect a pat on the head.
So, this is my three-pronged review, along with a few notes I’ve gleaned along the way from having watched more than 75 of these films in my lifetime.
The cast
Casting is critical for these movies, and those casts have to contain two primary ingredients: The main characters have to be able to unironically pull off the thickest, most Christmas-ass sweaters you’ve ever seen in your life and the ancillary cast has to contain vaguely familiar actors that force you and your partner to wonder where they came from. (Example: In the 2024 Hallmark release All I Need For Christmas, the female lead’s dad was played by an actor who also played a husband who died via antifreeze poisoning in a true movie about the woman who … poisoned a bunch of people with antifreeze.)
In this particular way, Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story shines. Just look at this list of character actors who aren’t in a leading role:
Diedrich Bader: In this movie, he’s the father of the female lead. In the past, he was the philosopher king, Lawrence, in the 2000 workplace comedy classic Office Space.
Richard Riehle: Another Office Space veteran (the guy who creates the jump to conclusions mat).
Abraham Benrubi: The big guy in ER.
Ed Begley Jr.: Begley is a legendary actor with hundreds of film and television credits, but always makes me smile as the straight-man hotel check-in clerk from Best in Show where he puts Eugene Levy in a supply closet until he gets his finances organized.
Megyn Price: The mom from the WB series Grounded for Life.
Add in a Donna Kelce cameo as a server at a made-up Kansas City barbecue staple called Norma and Nick’s (couldn’t they have just used Joe’s Kansas City?) and the absolute strangest list of NFL players you have ever seen in a movie—in exact order of appearance: Mecole Hardman Jr. holding a cat named Catrick Mahomes, Trey Smith, George Karlaftis and Clyde Edwards-Helaire, in addition to former Chiefs quarterback Trent Green wearing his own jersey—and you have the grist for Hallmark magic.
Rating out of 5: 6
The plot
Hallmark movies follow a very simple formula. I’ve abridged my version from an incredibly accurate Reddit post made on the matter a few years ago. Essentially:
A busy businessman/woman ventures into a small town either on assignment or to visit home for Christmas.
Very quickly, a romantic interest is plugged into their life via some Christmas-like circumstance such as the need to go back to your skating rink from high school to find out that your ex-boyfriend who you always loved still works there; or you need a last-minute Christmas tree, only to find a place staffed by the absolute best-looking person on earth, who also happens to be a pediatric neurosurgeon and choir leader; or you purchase some massive gingerbread-type latte and are snapped out of your busy business life by running head-on into some, again, incredibly good looking and successful person also gleefully stuck in this small town.
Then, the new couple runs into some kind of, what my favorite commenter called “the easily rectifiable misunderstanding.” It’s often a hyper-low-stakes problem—how can I be with a man who doesn’t put lights on his house?!—before arriving at the conclusion we at home have believed they should all along. Happily ever after. Lights. Roll credits.
In the case of Holiday Touchdown, a handsome out-of-towner becomes the Chiefs’ director of fan engagement and is part of the team’s search to find the team’s Fan of the Year, who will be awarded during a pregame coronation on Christmas Day.
The handsome out-of-towner, played by Tyler Hynes (costar of the second-best Hallmark movie ever, Three Wise Men and a Baby), is encouraged by his employers to get into town and discover the essence of Kansas City. After visiting Donna Kelce at Norma and Nick’s barbecue, he’s set up with the wildly thirsty family of actress Hunter King (the star of the third-best Hallmark movie ever, The Santa Summit). King’s family, as we learn in the introduction, started when two couples sat next to each other at Chiefs games in the 1960s and their children fell in love. The entire cabal owns a Chiefs fan store in town, which holds a glass-enclosed Chiefs snow hat given to Begley in the ’60s by a mysterious Santa Claus. The family comes to discover that wearing the hat on Chiefs games played on Christmas coincides with the team going to the Super Bowl.
Hynes and King clash when he expresses skepticism about the hat’s magical ability but reconcile when Hynes returns to the family store as a Chiefs representative and promises to win them the fan of the year contest. He wows King with his knowledge of the Chiefs, including my personal favorite moment, when he identifies Smith, the team’s guard, as a “Pro Football Writer’s Rookie of the Year.” Hynes, having known King’s family for all of 72 hours, is invited to an intimate Christmas gathering and gifts Begley the family’s original seats from the torn-down former stadium (a gift that, I’m guessing, probably cost him between $10,000 and $20,000? Go big or go home, I suppose).
A second easily reconcilable plot twist occurs when Hynes and King take the hat to a fan event and it’s stolen, ostensibly by the same gigantic Santa played by Benrubi as the one who gave Begley the hat in the 1960s. King then blames herself, starts to lose faith in the mystic series of holiday-themed coincidences that have run her life to this point and, with that, generally annoys Hynes, who thinks he has a solution to the issue but King won’t hear it.
SPOILER ALERT: The movie ends with Hynes having created a hat for every single Chiefs fan, showing King that the real power behind the Chiefs’ runs to the Super Bowl was her belief. They kiss on the field before the game, and Andy Reid asks them to leave the field. The gigantic Santa reappears in the stands and gives them the hat back.
How did every drunk Chiefs fan in theoretically sub-zero temperatures not rip the hats out from under their seats immediately? Do they follow the news closely enough on Chiefs.com to know the backstory? Why are the Chiefs in a December game with playoff implications? These questions were left unanswered.
Rating out of 5: 3 (I dinged them a few points here because of the needless Santa character whose repeated thefts served to confuse my wife and me at various points during the film.)
The Christmas
To me, this is the most important part of any Hallmark movie. It’s December, there’s snow on the ground and I want to see some goddamn tree chopping, cookie baking, mistletoe, blinking lights and all other manner of Christmas platitudes. Holiday Touchdown went all in here with a troika of familiar and reliable plot maneuvers.
• A gingerbread house baking contest where the male and female lead begin to truly fall in love.
• An outside bonfire backlit by neighborhood Christmas lights with homemade eggnog in which perfectly-timed CGI snow falls, solidifying the more skeptical male lead’s belief in the magic that takes place at Christmastime.
• An unnamed winter festival where everyone in the whole dang town—including the mayor of Kansas City and Trent Green—is there drinking massive, lightly spiked Christmas-themed drinks (Pa-Rum-Pu-Pum-Punch).
This is really why we come here. If I were to psychoanalyze, it’s probably some kind of connection to youth when everyone you know and love is always there, be it a church picnic or a high school football game. It’s comfortably small, yet big enough that the town feels like the universe and the universe is the town. Within those parameters, anything can still happen (even the arrival of some magical, high-powered executive who looks like a movie actor moving to your town in the Scranton suburbs).
My initial fear was that some, if not all, of these scenes would be gobbled up by Hallmark’s challenge of forcibly wedging football into the algorithm. Those handful of moments, though, included Hynes meeting up with Smith and Hardman, a run through Kansas City’s history of Super Bowls and a great scene in which the family is watching the Chiefs lose to the Green Bay Packers. They showed a clip of a Marquez Valdes-Scantling dropping a pass and the grandmother yelling, “But we were favored by 14 points!” Any time you can make a subtle reference to the team’s drop issues in 2023 while also feeding the gambling content machine, you’ve truly created art.
Rating out of 5: 4
Conclusion
Holiday Touchdown was not the best Hallmark movie of all time (that honor belongs to Holiday Switch). It was not the worst Hallmark movie of all time. However, to me, this represented a monumental challenge for the network’s writers and other creatives. How do you swallow a corporate monolith and absorb it into your world without having it alter the product in a way that turns fans to Netflix, Lifetime or Hallmark’s fiercest Christmas movie competitor, The Great American Family Channel (it exists, I promise)?
I was once doing a spot on a television network and they reviewed my list of things I’d make fun of before we taped. The list included a cell phone carrier, some fast-food chain, a major insurance provider and a monstrous airline. By the time we got to taping, the entire thing got stripped, which is a short way of saying that these kinds of collaborations tend to make magical, beautiful and funny things less magical and beautiful and funny (my stuff wasn’t funny regardless, but you get the point). And so, I very much appreciate a room full of accomplished writers having to take gentle creative direction from a sports league with a hysterically bad history of controlling a narrative.
So, my suggestion is to watch Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story if you like the general predictability of Hallmark movies. Like any good Hallmark character, I was mildly skeptical, I was presented with an easily rectifiable problem and I’ve come around to the joy that is the holiday without much of a fuss. My guess is that you, too, will see it this way.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as The MMQB Reviews Hallmark’s ‘Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story’.