We’re not sure what was more unbelievable when brothers Joyce and Rollie Hall got into the stationery business more than a century ago—that their company would later run one of the most-watched TV channels in the US, or that it would be responsible for so many Christmas movies starring DJ from Full House. Either way, the company’s origins were so humble that they could’ve inspired…their own Hallmark Channel movie.
Fade in: In the 1910s, in Kansas City, Missouri, a Methodist minister’s sons began selling greeting cards that became especially popular among World War I servicemen and families. In the ensuing decades, the Hall brothers invented modern wrapping paper, struck partnerships with Disney and artist Norman Rockwell, and hosted some radio shows before wading deeper into showbiz.
“Dear Fellows: We’re going to try our hand at television,” Joyce Hall wrote to his sales team in 1951, according to the New Yorker. Hallmark sponsored the world’s first written-for-TV opera that year and never looked back:
- After sponsoring other people’s productions for a few decades, Hallmark formed an entertainment arm in 1991 and later bought a stake in the religious cable network Odyssey.
- Hallmark absorbed Odyssey in 2001 and renamed it the Hallmark Channel, a new frontier for church-friendly family dramas.
- Upon the smash success of its 2006 flick The Christmas Card, Hallmark went full Yuletide mode and launched its annual “Countdown to Christmas” event in 2009.
- Its 2014 movie Christmas Under Wraps, starring former Full House star Candace Cameron Bure, was another “breakthrough” for the Hallmark Channel, former CEO Bill Abbott told the New Yorker in 2019. The company continued to cast former teen icons, including 2000s heartthrobs Chad Michael Murray and Jesse Metcalfe, to draw in younger viewers.
Now…Hallmark’s catalog of 300+ Christmas movies gives it an edge as cable TV in general declines—the Hallmark Channel was the most-watched entertainment cable network in the US in 2024. This quarter, it’s poised to be the most popular one among US women for the 12th straight year. But viewership is still eroding: 36 million people watched a Hallmark movie during the holidays last year, compared to 80+ million viewers in 2021, according to Nielsen data.
Hallmark’s formula: Serve up familiar, family-friendly, politics-free fun, according to Abbott, though most of Hallmark’s characters have historically been straight, white, and Christian. In 2020, Abbott stepped down after pulling a commercial that featured a lesbian couple. Following that PR crisis, the Hallmark Channel sought to diversify its programming, debuting its first Christmas rom-com with gay lead characters in 2022. That year, Bure left Hallmark for Great American Family, a smaller network that she said would “keep traditional marriage at the core,” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal Magazine.—ML