For scores of cable-television purists across the country, Hallmark has established itself as something of a feel-good pharmacy, its shelves lined with pills and potions in the form of holiday-moored movies helmed by Lacey Chabert and a slew of sexless soap stars. Per Nielsen, the main Hallmark Channel is currently the second-most-watched cable entertainment network of 2023. (The first? HGTV.) Because I’ve seen entirely too many of them, I know that by now the network has produced every kind of Christmas love story: Take The Nine Lives of Christmas, in which a bachelor firefighter finally commits to a veterinary student after taking in a stray cat, or The Christmas Prince, which follows an ambitious journalist who goes undercover and falls for a playboy prince in line for the throne. The collection remains overwhelmingly white and heteronormative (save for The Holiday Sitter, Hallmark’s 2022 foray into queer storytelling) and its formula consistent: Of the romantic leads, there is always one skeptic, one small-town devotee, and, most importantly, at least one paradigm-shifting sacrifice. The outsider—most often a big-city visitor—always decides to stay.
I’ll admit that on being invited to Mystic, Connecticut, for an up-close-and-personal look at the making of Mystic Christmas—one of 40 new films being added to the Hallmark repertoire this year, about a woman who (say it with me now!) reconnects with an ex just in time for cuffing season—I was oddly optimistic. Cynical journalist privately nursing a heartbreak travels to an East Coast village for a story? It sounded like, well, a Hallmark movie. Perhaps somewhere along the way, fate would intervene and I’d forget that not only do I hate Christmas (for complicated reasons that all involve capitalism) but also myself. Because that’s what Hallmark does, after all: It invites one’s delusions in from the bitter cold for a cup of sickly sweet cocoa.
So I headed off to Mystic. Here’s how it all went down.
I leave my apartment at least 15 minutes later than planned and without the thermos of coffee I’d prepared for the four-hour train ride from New York City. A few weeks earlier, and for the first time in my 29 years on this planet, I’d told someone I was in love with them—out loud, to their face, and with utter seriousness. Their feelings were complicated and ultimately unreturned. This is not the first occasion on which I’ve been turned down, but it’s singular in that a woman did it, meaning its memory will transcend time and space and tap me on the shoulder when I’m reincarnated as someone even less brave.
The train to Mystic departs at 7:41 a.m., and my ETA to Penn Station is 7:35 a.m. Could my late arrival be the catalyst for some kind of meet-cute? In the Hallmark universe, definitely. For all I know, I could hurtle onto the train just as it’s leaving the station and sink into the only available seat—beside a besuited businessman named Nick. As the cityscape slips away, we’d find ourselves engaged in a sparring match as I bemoan Christmas, the audience swiftly gleaning that I’m biting (but not at all bisexual). Meanwhile, he’d reveal he’s heading back to his hometown to save his grandmother’s candy shop from the sticky fingers of capitalism and a local real estate tycoon. Once in Mystic, we’d proceed to run into each other at a tree lighting or a cookie-decorating contest at the local elementary school and then eventually I’d succumb to a life of suburbia as Mrs. Candy Shop. Our movie would be called In the Nick of Time and Rachel Leigh Cook would star as me.
I arrive just as the train is pulling away without me. Goodbye, Nick.
Fortunately, I’ve found another train and am now en route, coffee in hand. However, it appears that fate isn’t on board. I don’t have a seatmate, and in fact the car is damn near empty. This is nothing like The Christmas Train or, hell, even Love at First Glance. Oh, well. Plenty of time to stare wistfully out the window and replay the exact moment of my most recent rejection to the mournful melodies of Caroline Polachek. Back in the city, I’m just another girl in a sweater.
I’ve arrived at a one-room station-slash-café called Mystic Depot Roasters. Two elderly women stop eating their lunch to study me from head to toe. To them, I am likely every bit the big-city trope, in six-inch platform boots. But because in this movie, they’re also tropes, they quickly return to gossiping about the locals. I order a latte and reread the synopsis of Mystic Christmas. The lead, Juniper Jones, a marine veterinarian, returns home to Mystic for a job at a rehabilitation center and aquarium during the holidays and rekindles her long-extinguished flame with Sawyer Adams, a pizza-shop owner. Tale as old as time.
Aided by Google Maps, I make my way into town, and an older gentleman proceeds to lay on the horn after I jaywalk in front of his truck. “I could be a cop!” he yells out the window. This would never happen to Autumn Reeser.
I suddenly understand why this seaport has served as a filming location for at least 40 movies and television shows. Mystic, with all its quaint streets and waterfront views, is very charming. When a gaggle of fishermen catcalls me from a boat near the famed Bascule Bridge, I don’t mind it nearly as much as I do when I realize the Mystic Massacre that took place here in 1637 is not referenced anywhere in the vicinity.
I have some time before I’m due on set, so I peruse a bookstore in town. I wonder for a moment whether a Hallmark movie has ever been set between the stacks and google it. Sure enough, there’s Love by the Book, which follows the story of Emma, a bookstore owner caught between two suitors. I pick out a collection of heart-wrenching queer love letters from throughout history that seems appropriate given my current state and imagine another meet-cute with the person behind the register.
Nope. I’m checked out by a graying woman who looks a lot like someone who insists she doesn’t watch Hallmark because it’s intellectually beneath her. My purchase gives her pause. “Just this?” she prompts. Perhaps I’m imagining a measure of disapproval in her tone, but I’m tempted to inform her that everyone’s a little gay—even people on Hallmark.
After looking into a few more shops, I decide I must pay homage to rom-com mecca: the real-life Mystic Pizza. The restaurant doesn’t bear much resemblance to what’s seen in its 1988 namesake starring Julia Roberts. In fact, it’s less a small-town slice slinger than an altar to Hollywood and the tourism industry, given every square inch of its walls is bedecked with autographed film posters and paraphernalia. Except, that is, for the 20-something employee who greets me from behind the bar. Maybe it’s the feigned politeness with which she addresses the other out-of-towners behind me or that she looks like she’d hang out with the Araujo sisters. I take a seat and order a beer.
Enough Hollywood folks have come through these parts that everyone’s got a story to share. For instance, Nicole Kidman came by Mystic Pizza around closing time once while filming a project nearby. Apparently, she loved the pies. “They’re doin’ a Christmas movie down the village today,” a grizzled man wearing a union sweatshirt says. That’s what I’m here for, I tell him. “Oh,” he answers, completely unfazed. He is not St. Nick in disguise.
Eventually, I learn that this Mystic Pizza employee recently relocated here from the New York area. She moved for love, yet she’s markedly eager to hear about my time in the city. We banter about this dive bar and that bagel spot, and it becomes abundantly clear that she’s nostalgic about her time there. She seems happy, albeit a little bored by her new surroundings. This, I suppose, is the fate of every Hallmark protagonist.
I arrive at the first filming location: the Mystic Seaport Museum. Given Christmas is still months away, I’d expected to be greeted by an embarrassment of gaudy decorations to overcompensate for the fact that it’s 67 degrees and the sidewalks are flecked with T-shirt-wearing tourists. Instead, there are but a handful of wreaths placed on a few of the more prominent doors and some strands of garland hanging limply from guardrails. I ask a publicist what gives, and she notes that it’s common practice to add both trimmings and snow in postproduction. Later, when I see the finished product, I barely recognize the site—and not only because it appears as a train depot instead of a museum.
Some of the cast—including Mystic Pizza’s William Moses—have just finished a scene and are now conducting interviews with a modest group of journalists. I sit down for a chat with Moses, Jessy Schram and Chandler Massey—the two romantic leads—and Patti Murin, who plays the token best friend to the protagonist.
“It’s a standard Hallmark plot,” Murin tells me when I ask what drew her to the story. “Girl comes home, reconnects with man from past…. It’s inside baseball, but I think when people watch it, they’ll be like, ‘I want to go to Mystic at Christmastime.’” Schram explains that it was the (fictional) shared history between the leads that most resonated with her. Oh, and some castmates that aren’t present: “You don’t get to deal with harbor seals in any other Hallmark movie.” Certainly not!
Moses confirms he’s up for a Mystic Pizza sequel and reveals that his first stop upon arriving in town to film was the very pizza shop I just left. “I came the first night I was here. I saw the sign, and people were standing under it taking a picture, and there I was, standing right next to them, getting ready to take my own picture,” he laughs. “They never looked twice at me.” I decide to share that one of my first crushes was on his character, a married architect who has an affair with his child’s Yale-bound babysitter. “Well, someone actually came up to me in the aquarium the other day and asked if I was in Mystic Pizza, and I said yes. And she said, ‘Oh, my God, you were so hot!’” Hallmark, where Hollywood’s retired heartthrobs go to get paid.
We proceed to Olde Mistick Village, a re-creation of an 18th-century New England hamlet but with modern boutiques, bakeries, and a printing press in which the next scene will be shot. The two leads will enter the print shop and ask to leave fliers for a toy drive they’re planning. Peter, the press’s solitary employee, will cheekily refuse to accept them unless they’re reprinted there instead. The leads oblige. End scene. Not exactly Citizen Kane, but then again, it’s not meant to be.
After a few takes—and learning that the average Hallmark shoot is a shockingly short two weeks—another reporter and I are told to hide behind the hulking press, just out of view, so we’re able to see the scene up close. Schram and Massey look as if they could do this in their sleep. Meanwhile, the young actor playing Peter is putting his entire old-timey-vested back into his three lines.
I overhear a publicist remark that everyone on the film has been staying at the same hotel for the last week and wonder how many Hallmark-esque love stories have begun behind the scenes since. I look around at the crew and imagine how mortifying it would be to hold a boom mic near someone who’s seen you naked.
Things are winding down for the day. My train leaves at 6:30 p.m., which gives me just enough time to take a few more notes and slurp some oysters at a restaurant I saw closer to the depot. I’m sent off with Mystic souvenirs, but still no meet-cute.
At S&P, a seafood restaurant on Mystic River, I settle in at a table overlooking the waterfront, pull out my notebook, and note some reflections—namely that Hallmark is every bit the well-oiled machine I suspected.
Just as I’m polishing off my oysters, I spot what I assume to be a young couple sitting together on the docks. Curiously, they can’t meet each other’s gaze and have instead opted to hang their heads and stare at their swinging feet over the water. Are they a couple breaking up? Maybe. Perhaps it’s just a difficult conversation. There’s a possibility too that they’re not together at all but one just told the other they’re in love with them and didn’t receive the response they’d hoped for.
I arrive, once again, at the depot, this time to discover two decent-looking guys in suits, talking as they wait for the train together. Is this it? Could one of them—or both!—be the steadfast albeit boring lead in my movie? Am I just in the nick of time? Of course not. They’re discussing whether teenagers should be allowed to access gender-affirming health care.
Mystic Christmas is not my favorite Hallmark movie. In fact, I’m not sure it’s even in my top 20. But it does feel unusually self-aware. Juniper concludes that returning home for the right job isn’t synonymous with yielding to the man she loves who just happens to live there too. Sawyer sets out to travel the world for culinary inspiration. Both leads pursue precisely what they want, even if it takes them away from each other for a while.
On the train home from Mystic, I remembered a time not so long ago when I thought it farcical that Hallmark movies never had anything but a happy ending. The love interests are invariably the right fit at the right moment. One I love you is always answered with another. The big-city protagonist never reenters her apartment alone—and still a cynic—in the finale. Real life isn’t so generous. But now I understand that’s exactly what such conclusions are for: to offer the audience an alternate reality from the shitty, sad ones we call our own.
Maybe I can just hang another wreath on mine in post.