“Hot Frosty” and “The Merry Gentlemen” won’t save the Netflix Christmas Universe with washboard abs

It may seem unimaginable now that we’ve once again found ourselves covered in cheap tinsel and fake snow every time we hear the tu-dum! sound, but a mere 10 years ago, there was no such thing as the Netflix Christmas Universe, known to fans at the NCU. Shocking, but it’s true. It took less than a decade for the most popular streaming service in the world to build its red-and-green grain silo that, each year, dumps a multitude of new movies onto viewers just as we’ve clawed our way to safety, gasping for air. But by now, we’re old pros. We take a deep breath as the chintzy, 90-minute holiday sewage piles onto us, ready to watch it all and come out victorious on the other side. One could compare this annual little death dance to “Squid Game,” but I don’t think Netflix needs any more credit.

Why do we endure? That’s the eternal question I find myself asking this year when Netflix has released some of its worst Christmas content yet — and I say “content” because, really, that’s what these movies are — with its latest films “Hot Frosty” and “The Merry Gentlemen.” Believe me, I’m completely aware that I sound like a Scrooge, a buzzkill harping and carping about innocuous movies that are meant to be little more than background noise while people scroll on their phones. But is that really what holiday movies should be, something to appease loud relatives during the holidays, like they’re dogs we’re leaving the TV on for? The NCU was once a charming if ridiculous way for the streamer to create holiday fare that even occasionally pulled at the heartstrings. Now, the NCU has become little more than a factory line, churning out homogenous products with an ever-so-slight degradation so as not to ruffle any feathers in the time it takes for the slop to calcify. 

And worst of all: No one seems to care! It’s like everyone has forgotten that by-the-numbers holiday movies can be good silly and not garbage silly. If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything, and it’s time for me to take my stand. We desperately need a State of the Union on the Netflix Christmas Universe, and it’s both my honor and my curse to give it to you.

Once upon a time, there was a little country of modest reign called Aldovia. It’s not real, but then again, what in the NCU is? Aldovia was the base upon which the Netflix Christmas Universe was built, beginning with 2017’s “A Christmas Prince.” In that film, a plucky, young reporter named Amber (Rose McIver) travels to Aldovia to write a story on the country’s nobility but ends up in the sights of Prince Richard (Ben Lamb), who’s looking for love outside of his stuffy Aldovian prospects. It’s a solid premise that showed some early promise for Netflix holiday originals. The streamer had enough money to pour into “A Christmas Prince” to believably pull off the whole grand royal scandal thing, while setting itself apart from the smaller-scale Christmas fare airing on The Hallmark Channel and Lifetime. 

The Princess Switch: Switched Again (Netflix)Until “A Christmas Prince,” Lifetime and Hallmark were the premier destinations for an annual dose of feel-good holiday cheer. Their original movies were predictable and provincial, but enjoyable in their monotony. The networks had their roster of stars like Candace Cameron Bure, Lacey Chabert and Alicia Witt to hold down the snow fort with some decent performing skill. Viewers like me who were looking for bad acting could depend on the roster of smaller, unknown Canadian actors to fill in the gaps for some hearty laughs. It felt OK, even encouraged, to laugh at these movies, largely because they were actually entertaining. At peak depression, I passed the languid days of December by posting the funniest out-of-context clips to my Snapchat story (when Snapchat was still a thing) and got my friends hooked on these movies too.

Films like 2011’s “Dear Santa,” 2015’s “The Spirit of Christmas,” 2016’s “Christmas Ranch,” and 2017’s “The Christmas Train” were all a ton of fun because they knew what they were and didn’t take themselves too seriously. They didn’t stray too far from a set path or take a stab at something new, they followed the formula: a snooty city girl has to return to the country to save a family establishment; a grieving husband rediscovers the magic of Christmas (sometimes quite literally); a rich woman learns that poor people have feelings too. They were fantastically mindless, and they were perfect. 

And then, Netflix kicked down the door like a S.W.A.T. team carrying giant candy canes. In the absence of a total streaming monopoly, the execs surely knew that they could corner the market on holiday movies with their seemingly endless resources. One of the best things about Hallmark and Lifetime’s Christmas films is that they look like they were slapped together with $52 and a dream. Netflix, however, began with a different approach that I initially admired: believability. Fake snow to make it actually look like Christmastime, decorations in every single frame and an overall production value that made some of their movies look almost decent enough to be released in theaters. But when “A Christmas Prince” evolved into a trilogy that spawned the entire NCU, the flair fell off fast. More movies meant more money, and those funds had to be split up between productions. Suddenly, the NCU became little more than explainer articles and chatter about its increasingly ludicrous plots and even more ludicrous wigs.

The NCU has transformed into a self-aware entity, more interested in tying its films together through loose connections than actually making a decent — i.e. respectably bad — movie. The “Christmas Prince” trilogy is directly linked to the “Princess Switch” trilogy, yet the star of the latter series, Vanessa Hudgens, also leads “A Knight Before Christmas.” Hudgens plays three different characters in “The Princess Switch” universe but an entirely different woman in “A Knight Before Christmas,” yet they take place in the same universe, implying the existence of four different Vanessa Hudgens doppelgangers running around the NCU. It’s a goddamn mess, constructed for one purpose and one purpose only: to distract us from the fact that none of these movies have a single redeeming quality anymore.

 Dustin Milligan as Jack Snowman in “Hot Frosty” (Netflix)This year, it almost seemed like the bigwigs at Netflix were starting to get the hint. (Whoever greenlit “Our Little Secret,” the closest thing Netflix has had to a genuine, theatrical Christmas movie in years, is a saint.) There was a clear attempt at trying to shake up the NCU with a shot of sex appeal, and it provided a brief, interesting new ripple. A sexy snowman with abs appears in “Hot Frosty,” while Chad Michael Murray’s washboard tries to hold up “The Merry Gentlemen.” Now that production values have fallen so far, maybe sex could be the factor that sets Netflix apart from its network competitors once more. But shirtless meatheads alone aren’t enough to carry a Christmas movie, and these two supposedly hot new entries into the extended NCU were ironically cold. 

So, now that we know even sex couldn’t sell, where the hell does the NCU go from here? Is there that much joy left in Netflix holiday movies at all? I’m not sure there is. We’re merely a society trained to lap up the crud served up to us on a platter just because it’s sitting there, screaming at us from the autoplay feature in Netflix’s infuriating user interface. Being the loudest doesn’t equate to being the best, it merely keeps Netflix in the conversation. Sure, as long as there are NCU movies to watch, people will suffer them. But this close to the new year, we should already be getting a jump start on our resolutions, adjusting our habits to better ourselves more easily, and not having one last roll in manure for old times’ sake. It’s okay to want better things for ourselves and more from our Christmas movies, even the terrible ones. We don’t have to simply accept everything is bad now, especially not when we spend so much of the year making that concession already.