“You can’t cancel Christmas on Hallmark.”
So said Michelle Vicary, Hallmark Channel’s executive vice president of programming, as she began chatting with E! News over the phone on Dec. 8. And she’s not wrong. Like string-light covered trees and candy canes, Hallmark Channel’s Christmas movies have become a staple for many during the most wonderful time of the year.
Countdown to Christmas, the network’s annual programming event that usually kicks off in October and runs through the end of December, is their Super Bowl. It’s so popular that it makes Hallmark the highest rated network in the fourth quarter, attracting hundreds of millions of viewers every year.
But after the coronavirus outbreak shut down production on movies and TV sets in March, fans feared they wouldn’t be getting their Christmas cheer courtesy of the network’s holiday rom-coms.
While Hallmark usually churns out more than 100 original movies per year—including programming blocks to celebrate each season, like Spring Fling and Fall Harvest—the mission to save Countdown to Christmas’ slate of 40 movies became the team’s sole focus after the shutdown once they realized it was going to be much longer than two weeks before production resumed.
“We knew we weren’t going to get movies on in the spring and even into the summer,” Vicary explained to E! News. “We were concerned about the fall, but we knew we had to get our Christmas slate going.”
