{H} allmark — the channel that has mastered the art of the feel-good Christmas movie — isn’t known for its diversity. Plots usually center on the big-city girl who moves back home only to discover that the once-nerdy boy next door is hot, or the estranged siblings who uncover a heartwarming family secret, or the stiletto-heeled career-woman who discovers the reason for the season (love, duh). There are always baked goods and fake snow and beautiful cookie-cutter actors who were so obviously made for Hallmark, it’s almost ridiculous. Most of them, I’m convinced, were.

Stereotypes abound over at Hallmark. Recycled actors and reusable plot lines haven’t stopped us rom-com saps from watching the channel, even though we know what to expect every time the classic Christmasy cursive flashes across a title screen. During the week of November 22, Hallmark was the “second most-watched [channel] across all of cable in prime time,” Forbes reported. Feel-good entertainment has a massive audience. And as the network’s executive vice president, Lisa Hamilton Daly, has said, Hallmark’s mission is to exemplify a “purpose-driven life of love, of emotion, [and] of family.”

For years, Hallmark has seen no need to produce varied or terribly original content. Its audience has been happy with the same-old lovey films. In 2020, though, Hallmark began a pivot toward more diverse movie offerings, in part because of backlash to a decision by Bill Abbott, the network’s former CEO, to pull advertisements that featured same-sex couples. The ads were restored days later, but Hallmark has been playing catch-up since. Wonya Lucas replaced Abbott in 2020 and began a crusade to build more “inclusive storylines,” Hallmark said. (Lucas stepped down this year after a three-year tenure.) To expand its movie selection, and to help consumers “see themselves in the love story,” Hallmark has released movies that incorporate LGBTQ characters and wider religious representation. This year, the channel plans to release its most diverse movies yet.

Hallmark will feature more “queer-forward” movies in the coming years, Daly told The Wrap, and two of the network’s 2023 films, Christmas on Cherry Lane and Friends & Family Christmas, both have queer characters. The former tells the story of three couples, one gay and two straight, who each celebrate the holidays at the same house on Cherry Lane, and the latter showcases a lesbian love story in which two friends fake-date, only to develop real feelings for each other.

Both of these plot lines are familiar to Hallmark fans. Who doesn’t know and love the familiar “friends to lovers” story? As in Hallmark’s typical straight-couple movies, the actors still wear preppy clothing, flit through kitschy winter settings, and exude small-town vibes. Characters still play to traditional gender roles and put an emphasis on the family. For all the fuss Hallmark made about diversity, I assumed gay representation would require more from the Hallmark-verse than just swapping out straight characters with gay ones.

Viewers don’t necessarily want to be confronted with pressing questions about gender and sexuality when they watch a Hallmark movie. The point of these movies was never their complexities or relatability. Viewers just wanted to mindlessly watch the unrealistic stories of holiday models who fall in love over cocoa at ski chalets, or share glances under the mistletoe at a failing small business that they helped to save. Ironically, Hallmark’s counter-cultural feature was its dedication to the traditional family model. Without that, fans are left only with shoddy scripts and predictable endings.

Round and Round is a new Hanukkah movie Hallmark released this year. The film follows Rachel, an editor at a book-publishing company who gets stuck in a time loop, à la Groundhog Day, on the seventh night of Hanukkah. Rachel figures out what she needs to do to escape the loop (follow her dreams and fall in love with the nice Jewish boy her grandma set her up with). From the grandma matchmaker to the Jewish deli called “Goldberg’s,” to casual drops of “chutzpah” in conversation, Hallmark tried to cram as many stereotyped Jewish references into the film as possible. As if that wasn’t inclusive enough, Rachel’s sister was a pregnant lesbian, married to another lesbian, who had one child already. They were simply background characters; but as Hallmark commits itself further to diversity, it’ll have to answer certain questions. How, for example, should a network whose success derives from its support for the nuclear family explain the details of in vitro fertilization or surrogacy?

Hallmark’s business model was solid and stood out in a crowded entertainment landscape. The channel was one of the last to promote traditional family values and feel-good stories in an industry that produces almost exclusively salacious or edgy content. Abandoning that mission isn’t likely to win Hallmark any new viewers and may well cost it its loyal fans.