MERRY CHRISTMAS, TED COOPER (2025)

Ted Cooper is a TV weatherman in Corning, New York. He's handsome and sweet-natured and considers himself a people pleaser, which is why he's inclined to turn down an offer from a bigger station in Buffalo as he feels he owes fidelity to his boss. He is also known for his bad luck at Christmas, to the point that his co-workers have a pool going to predict his latest accident—will he, say, chip his tooth on a candy cane or get stabbed in the eye with a Christmas tree or choke on fruitcake? (As it happens, yes to two of them.) He heads to Lackawanna, his hometown, to help his sister, who is doing fundraising for a new hospital wing, by running promos and hosting a gingerbread baking contest. He gets knocked out by a box of Christmas lights and ends up at urgent care where he's attended to by Hope Miller, a girl he had a crush on in high school. They strike sparks and Ted's sister Kate pushes him to start officially dating Hope. Things go well, but this being a Hallmark movie, some complications rear their ugly heads in the last half-hour, one involving a lost cell phone and a more serious one involving Hope's concern that Ted won't stand up for himself when he needs to. All is resolved in the last five minutes when Ted and Hope kiss on live television—something that is, oddly enough, also in the Ted Cooper Christmas mishap pool.

Whenever I think I'm about to give up on Hallmark Christmas movies (repetition of plots and situations, padding in the last half-hour), I run across one like this that I enjoy enough to recommend. For at least the first two-thirds, this is fun and delightful with two charismatic lead actors and at least some originality in the writing. Robert Buckley (pictured) is perfect as the charming and handsome Ted and he never makes a false move. Kimberly Sustad provides a nice balance as the more serious and practical love interest. Though Ted is always optimistic and a bit of a pushover, I think Hope's concerns about him are overblown by the script and the genre's need to set up obstacles in the home stretch. This is why the first hour is so good and the last hour feels weaker. Still, the two leads make this worth staying to the end. Hallmark veteran Brendan Penny is quite fun as the newscaster who loves to poke fun at Ted—he verges on being mean spirited, but Penny's performance is light and fun. The other supporting players tend to fade into the background, with the best being Barbara Pollard as one of Ted's beloved teachers and Tal Shulman in a small bit as a hungover escape room employee who leaves Ted and Hope in the escape room overnight. (It stretched my suspension of disbelief to imagine that the two of them kept their hands off each other all night long in a typically Hallmarkian display of dragging out romantic tension.) There’s a fun bit of business in the beginning when Ted arrives in Lackawanna and has accidentally picked up the suitcase of a college girl, leaving him wearing a pink Christmas crop sweater for a while, and yes, Buckley even looks good in that. Buckley also co-wrote the teleplay, and I like to think that he's responsible for the originality and the most of the fun business. A definite bright spot on the 2025 Hallmark schedule. [Hallmark Channel]