Love Dies a Slow and Tortuous Death at the Hands of Hallmark

Hallmark movies. Or Hellmark movies, depending on which title you prefer. In order to enjoy them on any level, you must ignore mediocre acting, writing, storylines, and pretty much everything else to do with a movie. There are typically two molds: 1) Either a Christmas movie of some sort, or 2) a single mother (or father) whose significant other either died or ran out. But sometimes, a Hallmark movie will break out of the typical hum-drum mold and be breathtakingly... worse.

Take the Love Comes Softly series. There have been ten of them: Love Comes Softly, Love's Enduring Promise, Love's Long Journey, Love's Abiding Joy, Love's Unending Legacy, Love's Unfolding Dream, Love Takes Wing, Love Finds a Home, Love Begins, and Love's Everlasting Courage. (I don't really blame Hallmark for the lack of creativity in titles; the book series by Janette Oke has the same problem.) Taken individually, exactly two of them are decent movies: Love Comes Softly and Love's Enduring Promise. The rest are painfully bad, both in acting and in story. But what really makes this series stand alone among other movies from Hellmark is its strangely convoluted family tree.



I dare you to try to understand this
(Click to enlarge)



Okay, so the light blue represents marriages that end with deaths. The dark blue represents children from those marriages. Gray lines are for marriages that are not killed off in any of the movies. Black lines are for children from those marriages. Red is for fiancées that die. As you can see, nearly everybody is married twice (or at least engaged twice), with the paltry exceptions of Drew and Willie, who both die. Wait a minute, you say. What about Erik? I'll get to him later.

First, I have another objection, as Lady Catherine from Pride and Prejudice would say. This is the mysterious appearance and disappearance of convenient characters. First, Ellen's sister is a teenager in Love Begins. In Love's Everlasting Courage, which takes place only about six years after the first one, she isn't even mentioned. Not one word. They could at least have said she married and moved away or something. (Maybe they have a movie for her in the works somewhere down the road... in Hellmark, there is no mercy.) Then there's Ellie King, who apparently is Marty and Clark's daughter. She is slated as the main character in Love's Christmas Journey, which hasn't yet been played on Hallmark. Hm. Where did she come from, exactly? I don't remember seeing her or hearing of her in any movie I've seen.

As far as Erik goes, I'm only guessing that he'll end up marrying Ellie (I haven't seen the new movie). Thus the dotted line and his exclusion from the deathless club. So he might just end up being the only lucky fellow who not only does not suffer the loss of a significant other, but also doesn't die. Ellie, on the other hand, was married to some dude with the last name of King, so that makes her... a widow. In a Christmas movie. See a pattern?

Hallmark must make a lot of money on Christmas movies and the Love series. But, in point of fact, they're becoming ridiculous. The only (and I mean the only) thing that rescued the two most recent movies (Love Begins and Love's Everlasting Courage) from the mediocrity and overall bleah-ness of most of the others was the handsome, good actor who played Clark. Christmas Hallmark movies can be funny, but the world doesn't need 27,000 of them to survive, especially since they're usually a lot alike. Put Christmas movies and the Love series together and what do you get? Well, I guess something straight from Hellmark.