Candy Coated Christmas

Who dutifully queued up to heap "10s" into the early IMDb rating score, explaining how a lackluster and forgettable X-mas romcom started out with the sort of numbers you would expect to see for the likes of BLADERUNNER 4 or AVENGERS 12. This is the first co-production of Discovery+ and the Food Network, which is interesting. When the History Channel went into the production business, they took risks and those risks paid off bigtime -- VIKINGS, for ex. No such risk taking here! This is a by-the-numbers boy-meets-girl-in-quaint-smalltown that could have been penned by any high school film class. The sponsors even picked MarVista to produce, a company that has popped out more assembly-line X-mas films than there are stars in the sky. The leads are generic, the story is generic, the plot arc is generic, and the town so unremarkable it may as well be CGI. The only thing that pops are the many cooking vignettes and tasty edibles. Which is of course what you can find on the FOOD NETWORK 24/7. Without all those cumbersome actors, stray bits of dialog, and other distractions.