Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Santa, Maybe’ on Great American Family, a Holiday Rom-Com Revolving Around A Secret Santa Exchange

Christmas Movie Onslaught ’23 continues its barrage with Great American Family’s scintillating Secret Santa saga Santa, Maybe, which puts all of its rom-com tension on that lone load-bearing comma in the title. Because, like, you’re supposed to pause when you hit that comma, but not like you’d hesitate on dots of ellipsis. This story of a theatre manager and a marketing coordinator trying to overcome their past rivalry in order to find a little bit of love at Xmastime hangs entirely on that comma; now let’s hope that one little punctuation mark is strong enough to bear the weight of it all. 

SANTA, MAYBE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: DATELINE: SIX WEEKS ’TIL XMAS. Because what’s an Xmas movie without a countdown to Xmas? LOCATION: THE WOODCREST VALLEY THEATRE. Busy time of year at these types of smallish theatre-with-an-re-not-an-er theatres. There’s so many A Christmas Carols and Nutcrackers to stage. And so Lila (Aubrey Reynolds), the theatre manager, is busy busy busy. And on top of that, she has a new marketing coordinator to break in at the Woodcrest, which seems to have more employees than actual seats for patrons. So many employees at a venue that’s so small you just imagine Lila renting a different, larger venue to host the work Christmas party. I mean, there’s the accounting guy and the marketing guy and the assistant marketing guy and the ticket lady and the maintenance crew and the ballet director and the assistant manager and the props dude and, and, and. How profitable is this place, anyway? Maybe it’s a nonprofit? Maybe they charge $800 a seat? Lots of well-moneyed season subscribers? May I see a breakdown of the business model, please? Am I distracted? I’m distracted. Let’s get back on track; these rom-com tropes and present-wrapping montages aren’t going to make fun of themselves.

Anyway. The new marketing coordinator isn’t just any marketing coordinator – it’s Glenn (Samuel Whitten). Lila takes one look at him and her face falls into a frown. That’s something, because she’s kind of a chipper type, sweet and thoughtful, delivers doughnuts to all 2,500 of her fellow employees, that type of person. But Glenn sours her because he was her high school tormentor, a prankster who once tricked her into sitting in a pile of horse flop. That’s merely one mean-spirited incident among many, and she still smells the dookie stuck to her slacks, psychologically speaking, at least. And here he is, implementing a plan to boost ticket sales by replacing the lead Nutcracker dancer with a marquee diva, which complicates Lila’s life. On top of that, it’s Secret Santa time at the Woodcrest, which A) means there’s a narrative device to hold the plot together, and B) probably requires hiring an outside Secret Santa temp crew to manage, considering the staff size is roughly the equivalent of the population of Minneapolis.

Now what we have here are some trajectories: One Secret Santa gift a week for six weeks; one pending arrival of a high-maintenance ballerina; two people who have to get over their shared troubled past in order to make a connection during the stressful holiday gauntlet. At first, Glenn pretends to not remember what a j-hole he was to Lila, but he remembers, he definitely remembers. He also seems to be attracted to her, which means he really has his work cut out for him. Opportunity presents itself when semi-wacky supporting character-slash-marketing assistant Zeke (Golden Goodwin) draws Lila’s name in the Secret Santa sweepstakes, and Glenn trades giftees with him. Glenn notices that Lila is really prone to paper cuts – don’t laugh, those things hurt – and gets her band-aids; she keeps losing her pen, so he makes a wreath out of pens, etc. Very thoughtful. More than just, as Zeke suggests, “something generic, like some smelly lotion or an ornament.” Glenn also tries to erode Lila’s emotional barriers like an eight-year-old attempting to take out the bottom snowball of a snowman with blasts of urine: he shares his Thanksgiving leftovers and buys her dinner and eventually acknowledges his teenage buttholery with a heartfelt apology. Will he win her over? DO NOT OPEN THIS SPOILER PRESENT ’TIL XMAS. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Secretly Santa (Lifetime, 2021, a.k.a. Falling in Love at Christmas); Secret Santa (2003, starring Jennie Garth); Dear Secret Santa (2013, starring Tatyana Ali). 

Performance Worth Watching: Aubrey Reynolds hops from 2021’s Hot Chocolate Holiday to this, and here shows enough of an amiable presence to carry lightweight Xmas stuph like this, even when the characters are written thinner than a half teaspoon of cocoa powder in a gallon of water.

Memorable Dialogue: Lila’s assistant manager-slash-bestie Marie (Shona Kay) splits a hair – or should it be cuts some crap? – after Lila tells her the Glenn-made-her-sit-in-horse-flop story:

Lila: I ran into a girl in college and she still called me Cowpie.

Marie: It wasn’t even cow manure!

Lila: That’s not the point!

Sex and Skin: None. Sex does not exist in Great American Family movies. So the logical assumption is, all the characters are from virgin births. 

Our Take: The exact location of Woodcrest Valley is a mystery, but I assume it exists in the bustling burg of Dullsville. Great American Family productions tend to be the holiday-movie equivalent of baloney on white bread. So by integrating a Christmas theme into a boilerplate featherweight workplace romance, Santa, Maybe puts a dollop of innovative mustard on that formulaic sandwich to make it less bland. Congrats, Great American Family! You’ve made a boring movie about boring straight White people that’s a scintilla less boring than all the other boring movies about boring straight White people! Meanwhile, Hallmark drops SantaCon movies and integrates cute dogs and whodunits and LGBTQ couples into their plots, making Lila’s flimsy psychological hurdles – will she ever get over her Glenn Horseplop Trauma to fall in love with him? Ohmigod, maybe she should call Dr. Melfi! – look as consequential as a Virginia Slim being tossed into Kilauea.

To be fair, simplicity has its charms, but not when it’s the product of an underwritten screenplay. The stakes are low in Santa, Maybe: The diva-ballerina subplot doesn’t even threaten to derail the Nutcracker, and if we were supposed to be worried about the show going on, we barely noticed; the Lila’s-a-bit-of-a-workaholic thread barely registers; the build-up to the Secret Santa reveal generates sub-minimal tension. Reynolds is a likable enough lead, but her chemistry with Whitten lacks fizz, like a soda left out to get stale – you might drink it anyway, but you won’t enjoy it much. Not that this is a destination movie, mind you. It’s inoffensive wallpaper that knows its fate as background noise for other, slightly less boring activities, like putting off answering the work email about the holiday potluck, or thumbing through the Bradford Exchange catalog and wishing you could afford that tacky shit for gag gifts. And it knows it all too well. 

Our Call: There’s a new Hallmark Xmas movie about a kid who wants to break a world record for Jenga constructions – and then there’s this thing, which asks us to give a half a crap about two incompatible drips who fall for each other because a screenplay dictates it. God, I’m bored just describing Santa, Maybe. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.