Well, as the TV Christmas holiday season winds down, I just wanted to say what I thought of it. It was pretty lame. It's like all my complaints about radio have been applied to TV. Led by AMC and Freeform, the premise is that the month of December is dedicated to Christmas shows and movies, all month! Every day! Except here's the thing, they only have enough movies to fill a weekend. Both channels are ENDLESSLY repeating the same dozen movies over and over, sometimes two or three times a day and then again on weekends. Freeform apparently lost a good number of their Christmas product and has been reduced to filling in the gaps with Pixar movies that have nothing to do with Christmas.
It's a little sad, actually. I think I prefered the old fashion way where the TV schedule was sprinkled with holiday specials, movies and Christmas-theme episodes of shows, not inundated. Don't get me wrong, I like ELF, just not exclusively. Freeform used to have a better handle on it. They used to have so many shows, that they had to start a "Countdown to 25 Days of Christmas" to show them before they even got to December. But, with the loss of Harry Potter, they've been reduced to filling the void with Toy Story marathons.
AMC filled their spotty inventory by getting the rights to all the Baskin/Rankin TV specials, just not the ones you remember ("Jack Frost" "Rudolph's Shiny New Year"). Followed by Elf, or the colorized version of "Miracle on 34th Street."
I guess TCM has the right idea, just do the Christmas movies once a week through the month, but oddly, TCM doesn't have the rights to a lot of the best Christmas movies, so they've been forced to "create" their own Christmas classics, older, overlooked films like "Remember the Night" (which sounds like a Titanic movie) or "A Holiday Affair," a Christmas movie starring Mr. Holiday Cheer himself, Robert Mitchum.
Well, there's always next year. Or July, when they pull out that "Christmas in July" nonsense.
It's a little sad, actually. I think I prefered the old fashion way where the TV schedule was sprinkled with holiday specials, movies and Christmas-theme episodes of shows, not inundated. Don't get me wrong, I like ELF, just not exclusively. Freeform used to have a better handle on it. They used to have so many shows, that they had to start a "Countdown to 25 Days of Christmas" to show them before they even got to December. But, with the loss of Harry Potter, they've been reduced to filling the void with Toy Story marathons.
AMC filled their spotty inventory by getting the rights to all the Baskin/Rankin TV specials, just not the ones you remember ("Jack Frost" "Rudolph's Shiny New Year"). Followed by Elf, or the colorized version of "Miracle on 34th Street."
I guess TCM has the right idea, just do the Christmas movies once a week through the month, but oddly, TCM doesn't have the rights to a lot of the best Christmas movies, so they've been forced to "create" their own Christmas classics, older, overlooked films like "Remember the Night" (which sounds like a Titanic movie) or "A Holiday Affair," a Christmas movie starring Mr. Holiday Cheer himself, Robert Mitchum.
Well, there's always next year. Or July, when they pull out that "Christmas in July" nonsense.
