Happiest Season Is Perfect for My Holiday Couch Time

I don’t watch Hallmark Holiday movies. I’m not that sentimental. I cannot muster enough preciousness to find them anything but a giant waste of my time. See also: Gilmore Girls, Friends and 98% of reality television (the 2% belonging to GBBO only).  

Now, that I’ve alienated most of you, please know that I wish I had that gene. That one that allows me to enjoy This is Us or HGTV unironically, but my goth soul will not allow it. I would rather spend the holidays watching gloomy, dark dystopian documentaries that only appear on Vimeo than a cheery fake prince coming to Montana to hide from his duties in Tunisia only to find true love with the quirky, struggling macaron maker. Vom. 

But that doesn’t mean I don’t like Christmas movies. I do. I love the nostalgia of watching White Christmas and Scrooge with my dad (he cackles when Albert Finney calls Marley “an old potato,” and it is the sound of Christmas joy to me). While You Were Sleeping and The Preacher’s Wife remain two of my absolute favorite movies. I’ll settle down for Love Actually or The Family Stone or The Holiday. And we never let a season slip by without several showings of Home Alone and Home Alone 2. 

I need my Christmas cheer with a little hint of something more than just a tinsel explosion and perfect barrel curls. I need tension, a hook, a wackiness or at the very least: some really, really freaking good actors.

Enter: Happiest Season.

Happiest Season is hitting Hulu on Thanksgiving weekend just in time to perfect our holiday couch time. It’s the first LGBTQ holiday rom-com that looks just like all the other holiday rom-coms with bustling crowds, twinkle lights, well placed beanies, and big city couple heading home to midwestern affluence and actual snow. 

What do I love about this trailer? First of all: CAST CAST CAST CAST CAST. Give me actors I want to watch in anything anyway, and you can get me to sign into Hulu for the first time in 3 months. 

First of all, Mackenzie Davis’s Harper is precious, but I believe her to be even more so when her sisters are perfectly suited to developing a precious person. Alison Brie and Mary Holland make a very believable sibling sandwich. 

Even better are Mary Steenbergen and Victor Garber as wealthy, slightly naive, effusively loving empty nester parents. I can’t imagine wanting better ones, although I have a hard time believing that they could be so willfully obtuse about who Abby is to Harper. Could this have been better if they’d been loving but aloof southern bombasts played by Kristen Chenowith and Dennis Quaid? I’d believe it more, but I’d like it less. 

Speaking of believability making way for desirability, I want to see Dan Levy in EVERYthing, so he is the brightest of lights in this trailer, and I pray that we didn’t get all of his good moments already. Do I believe that his expansive gay man would be best friends with Kristen Stewart’s put together lesbian? No. Do I love it though? Yes. 

And Aubrey Plaza as a menacing former high school girlfriend of Harper’s, purely in town to mess shit up for everyone? HERE FOR ALL OF IT. 

But best of all is Kristen Stewart herself. I will fight anyone who doesn’t fight for her right to make bottle blonde great again, in all its messiness, brassiness and new-growth joy. I love her bumbling. I love her incredulity. I love her trying to hide Harper behind a door like she’s Edward Cullen. Full circle. 

Happiest Season will hit Hulu on November 25th.