This felt remarkably lacking in Christmas spirit, as if the participants were simply acting out what was written down in the script without feeling any real motivation for their actions. Plenty of surface Christmas detail (decorations, snow and other cliches), but this lacked a heart.
If the protagonists, the two co-producers of the live Christmas special, were supposed to overcome their differences and grow to like/love each other, it would have helped if there'd been some clear conflict between them at the beginning -- but they never seemed to lock horns.
And the idea of reuniting dispersed (sic) brothers, didn't work for me because they were adopted and couldn't have looked less like members of the same family. That's not a comment on adoptive versus non-adoptive families, but the physical dissimilarities here felt like distractingly random casting.
As another reviewer mentioned, Julia Wise (played by Teryl Rothery) is, for someone who's supposed to be a lifestyle guru, surprisingly charmless. It's either another failing of the script or Teryl Rothery is simply miscast (her smooth forehead and resultant lack of facial expressiveness, didn't help).
If the protagonists, the two co-producers of the live Christmas special, were supposed to overcome their differences and grow to like/love each other, it would have helped if there'd been some clear conflict between them at the beginning -- but they never seemed to lock horns.
And the idea of reuniting dispersed (sic) brothers, didn't work for me because they were adopted and couldn't have looked less like members of the same family. That's not a comment on adoptive versus non-adoptive families, but the physical dissimilarities here felt like distractingly random casting.
As another reviewer mentioned, Julia Wise (played by Teryl Rothery) is, for someone who's supposed to be a lifestyle guru, surprisingly charmless. It's either another failing of the script or Teryl Rothery is simply miscast (her smooth forehead and resultant lack of facial expressiveness, didn't help).