Hulu gets into the seasonal spirit with A Christmas Frequency, a new holiday movie starring Denise Richards as well as made-for-VOD mainstays Ansley Gordon and Jonathan Stoddard. This is the third collaboration between Gordon and Stoddard in two years, all as part of films that usually end up on broadcast networks like Ion Television, UPtv, or Bounce TV. A Christmas Frequency, however, gets the honor of being Hulu’s top-billed holiday original (at least in the streamer’s publicity emails). Does Nicely Entertainment’s A Christmas Frequency live up to the standards set by other Hulu romcom acquisitions, like Happiest Season, Palm Springs, or Fire Island? Or would the movie be more at home broadcast on a channel caught between stations on your TV set?
The Gist: Ansley Gordon (The Abigail Mysteries) plays Kenzie, a talk radio producer paired with iconic on-air personality Brooke Walkins (Denise Richards). As iconic as Brooke is, Breakfast with Brooke has been on a decline ever since the show’s host secretly split with her husband (Passions‘ James Hyde). The audience can tell that something’s off with Brooke, but this relationship expert is too embarrassed to admit that she didn’t know how to save her marriage.
Faced with cancellation, Kenzie comes up with a truly 21st-century idea for this decidedly 20th-century medium: have Brooke go on blind dates on-air, first via call-in and then — if the guy isn’t nuts — in-studio. Sounds like a perfect idea, right? Brooke thinks so! There’s just one complication: Kenzie’s been getting surprisingly close to Ben (A Royal Christmas On Ice’s Jonathan Stoddard), a journalist who works in her building. What’s Kenzie going to do when Ben’s profile lands in Brooke’s blind date inbox? This is a conundrum that will take approximately 90 minutes to establish and then resolve!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If you’ve watched a couple hundred of these movies, then A Christmas Frequency may remind you of other radio-centric holiday movies like Netflix’s Holiday Rush or Lifetime’s Dear Christmas.
Performance Worth Watching: Casey Waller (Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens) is having some fun as Maya from the radio station’s social media team (although “team” is a stretch considering that this radio station seems to have four employees total). She gets a few good jokes, too, which she only improves by nailing the delivery. Case in point: “My lips are sealed. Seriously — this new lipstick I got? So sticky.”
Memorable Dialogue: Denise Richards enters her Miranda Priestley era: “You really don’t remember that I’m intermittent fasting? I am not having lunch.”
A Holiday Tradition: The radio station holds a Christmas Soiree — and you better believe it’s on Christmas Eve. If you’re a character in a TV holiday movie, you are going to be spending Christmas Eve so far away from the comfort of your home and loved ones. You are going to be hanging out with co-workers in an office, probably in formal attire and you are going to love it.
Does the Title Make Any Sense?: It does inasmuch as the movie is set at a radio station, notorious transmitter of frequencies. But there’s nothing frequency-specific about A Christmas Frequency. The blind dates are way more integral to the plot, so I’m pitching the titles A Date for Christmas, Date the Halls, or the generic — and therefore probably perfect — A Blind Date Christmas.
Our Take: It’s barely November and here’s A Christmas Frequency giving me my first existential crisis of the holiday movie season. The crisis: why does a movie like A Christmas Frequency exist? I know why it exists — because we, culturally, decided that Christmas wasn’t complete without nonstop holiday content that we could put on the TV, turning one wall of our home into a moving Christmas card starring faces we sorta remember from thirty years ago. These movies don’t have to be original or even good. Regardless of quality, whole online eco-systems of podcasters, YouTubers, and reviewers (hi) thrive on mocking, celebrating, and/or ironically celebrating these movies. We decided long ago that this would be a thing, and a thing it has remained long enough to bring late ’90s icon turned soap star turned ex-Bravolebrity Denise Richards into the genre.
The problem with A Christmas Frequency, though, is that the genre has evolved. Last year’s release of formula outliers Three Wise Men and a Baby and Haul Out the Holly showed that these movies don’t have to rely on stock characters and plots in order to give you those holiday feels. We’ve already seen grand ambition in the 2023 Hallmark movie lineup from entries like Where Are You, Christmas? and Mystic Christmas. What can I say — where Hallmark goes, so go our expectations for all holiday TV movies.
So by comparison, by-the-numbers movies like A Christmas Frequency don’t shine as brightly as they maybe would have in 2019. While all the performances are perfectly fine, and I truly wonder why Gordon and Stoddard aren’t part of Hallmark’s ever-increasing stable of stars, the vibes just feel off. Part of it is the pacing, as A Christmas Frequency lacks a lot of the pep that makes these movies entertaining. A full 20 minutes pass before Kenzie tells Brooke her big plan, and then it takes almost another 20 minutes for Brooke to go on her first date. Another part of it is the cast, which is sparse. Empty cafes, empty offices — you don’t realize how much crowd scenes add to holiday movies until you watch scene after scene set in a big city newspaper that has a staff of two (one person to write expense reports, one person to collect expense reports). The entire movie feels like what it’s like to be at work after 9 p.m.
I will say this for A Christmas Frequency: at least the holiday decor is appropriately overwhelming, and makes the movie a solid choice If you’re looking to turn your TV into a moving holiday scenescape.
Our Call: SKIP IT. If you really want to fill your home with holiday spirit, put the TV on Hallmark and let it ride.