[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]
Sunday night on Hallmark Channel, Holiday Hotline is a timely Countdown to Christmas entry centered around the tradition of cooking a turkey for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Emily Tennant plays Abby, whose parents (Jan Skene and John B. Lowe) send her from the UK to Chicago to recover from a bad break up and corresponding job bail out. Arriving at her aunt’s pre-war walk up, she makes fast friends with neighbor Margaret (Marina Stephenson Kerr) and less friends with Jack (Niall Matter), the architect restoring the building.
When Margaret voluntells Abby, whose reputation as a world-class chef precedes her, to fill in on her pre-Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Day shifts on a turkey-prep help line (think the Butterball hotline), Abby goes. She makes a great impression on manager Roger (Erik Athavale) and over a series of vignettes with the neat device of dropping her into various callers’ predicaments, the tone is set for the ridiculous array of advice she’s asked for.
That is until she gets a call from “John,” on whom she test drives an American persona, “Peggy,” and accent to better appease surly callers who think she can’t possibly help if she’s British. We know John is Jack and Peggy is Abby the whole time. Jack is on the hook for a turkey dinner for Thanksgiving as a test run for Christmas dinner after his tween daughter, Jessica (Myla Volk), finally admits that she misses the Christmas dinners they had before they lost her mom. Wholly out of his depth, he commits to restoring Christmas for her.
He calls the help line and gets Abby, and the two hit it off as their conversations move past meal prep and into general life things. Separately, Abby keeps running into, and softening toward, Jack in the real world, as well as his daughter, brother, Mike (Michael Strickland) and Mike’s fiance, Erica (Cora Matheson), who’s another neighbor in the building. That makes things extra sticky when she realizes the double identity thing. As Christmas approaches, and she readies to go home, she has to make a decision on whether, when, and how to reveal the truth.
Tennant and Matter have a fun energy together, playing two wholly separate relationships with each other that finally merge. And via the drop in device, we see them onscreen together throughout the film, sitting side by side during Peggy and John’s calls and then face to face in the world as Abby and Jack. Mark Jean directs the teleplay by Julie Sherman Wolfe based on a story by the late Duane Poole, who wrote several films for Hallmark and to whom the film is dedicated.
Holiday Hotline premieres at 8 pm/7c Sunday on Hallmark Channel in the US and W Network in Canada. It will also be available on various streaming platforms. Here are a couple of sneak peeks.
Photos courtesy of Steven Ackerman/Hallmark Media; video courtesy of Hallmark Media.
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