Television review: Christmas finds a home on cable TV

Christmas is a time for television. Sitcoms are dressed with wreaths and trees; dramas, for the space of an episode, get extra-poignant, perhaps by the addition of a homeless person. In animated specials, collected through generations, something bad almost happens to Christmas itself: Santa is sick; he is tied up in a closet; his team lacks a reindeer. A sad little Christmas tree is plumped with love. Frosty hearts melt like marshmallows in the hot chocolate milk of human kindness.

As the broadcast majors have grown content mostly to trim ongoing series with seasonal signifiers and bring a few classics down from the attic, the lion’s share of new holiday show-making has moved to basic cable, where networks such as Nickelodeon service children the live-long day and Lifetime and the Hallmark Channel keep faith with the TV movie, in a low-budget, reduced-expectations sort of way. Lifetime likes a tabloid thrill, but nothing you see on Hallmark will make you any more anxious than the opening of a Christmas card; predictability, one would say, is part of the deal, and appeal.

A great number of these films focus on women, many facing some version of the old false choice between a Cary Grant and a Ralph Bellamy. Others have cut themselves off from love entirely.

In Lifetime’s “Sundays at Tiffany’s” (Monday), Alyssa Milano must choose between straw man Ivan Sergei — a self-admiring actor — and the magically embodied adult self of her childhood imaginary friend ( Eric Winter). An odd mix of Peter Pan, Pinocchio and “The Bishop’s Wife,” it suggests that what a woman really wants is a boy-man with practical skills who can read her mind — because he’s been in it. Much the same business animates ABC Family’s “Christmas Cupid” (Dec. 12), which has been hung on the bones of “A Christmas Carol,” as the characters point out repeatedly lest you think them ill-informed. It stars Christina Milian as a self-centered workaholic publicist who is haunted by the spirits of old boyfriends and the ghost of a Lindsay Lohan-like client ( Ashley Benson, good), as perpetually glued to the martini whose olive choked her as Jacob Marley was to the chains he forged in life. Will Milian “die alone” in her turn? It’s a fear that fuels many basic-cable films. But I never cared whether she would or not.

Similar architecture (romantic triangle, helpful shades, supernatural Christmas deadline) underpins Hallmark’s “Three Wise Women” (Dec. 14), a Dublin-set “Carol” variation in which the guiding spirits are the protagonist’s younger and older selves (Lauren Coe, Amy Huberman and Fionnula Flanagan, in ascending chronological order). There is also Hugh O’Connor as one of those angels-on-probation types. The film takes good advantage of the farcical possibilities suggested by the premise, Coe is lively and the text benefits greatly from being spoken in an Irish brogue. Also set on the Emerald Isle is Hallmark’s period piece “An Old-Fashioned Christmas,” (Dec. 11). Catherine Steadman plays an aspiring writer from America who accompanies rich grandma Jacqueline Bissett to visit an aristocratic old beau — a stroke-struck poet — his scheming wife and their wastrel son (Leon Ockenden, whose charm is largely what keeps this kettle on the boil, though Steadman comes across as sharp). The arrival of pure-of-heart fiancé Kristopher Turner makes this watchable movie triangular too.

“Farewell Mr. Kringle” (Hallmark, Saturday) is a sort of small-town “Miracle on 34th Street” in which the Santa figure (William Morgan Sheppard) — in whose honor his fellow citizens have renamed their city Mistletoe — knows that he isn’t actually Kris Kringle and ultimately describes his own pathology. (It’s common for these films to spell out their themes and motives, in order to leave no viewer behind.) Christine Taylor is the big-city journalist who learns to love again but for some reason calls the readers of her blog “bloggers.” Shashawnee Hall is conspicuously natural as the mayor.

Troublesome men are also the issue in “On Strike for Christmas” (Lifetime Movie Network, Sunday), with Daphne Zuniga as an under-appreciated mom driven to a holiday work-stoppage. It deflates toward its almost arbitrary end, but Zuniga remains a real person throughout. In “The Battle of the Bulbs” (Hallmark, Dec. 18), Daniel Stern and Matt Frewer play new neighbors and old rivals whose ongoing enmity takes the shape of competing Christmas displays. It’s nice to see them, but there is nothing new here, and the picture drags them down to its level; they cannot lift it to theirs.

That the holidays are actually fun, and funny, and that television can be smart and original is left to the makers of kids’ shows to demonstrate. In Nickelodeon’s sprightly “The Penguins of Madagascar: The All-Nighter Before Christmas” (Dec. 12), the cartoon inhabitants of the Central Park Zoo cause mayhem in Manhattan as they try to organize a Christmas party. Random lines indicate its tone: “You know what anarchy is, don’t you, kids?” “This is New York City, baby, the capital of France.” “Curse you, Internet — 28,000 cat videos, zero useful information.”

In “A Very School Gyrls Holla-Day” (Nickelodeon, Saturday), the stars of Nick Cannon’s “School Gyrls” featurette return, narrating as their future aged selves a spaghetti-strap-thin tale of being trapped in a mall overnight — it’s just connecting tissue, really, between some new and old holiday songs in modern modes and makes no particular sense, but it’s loose and likable. The story-to-song ratio is much higher in “Big Time Christmas” (Nickelodeon, Saturday) an hourlong expansion of “Big Time Rush,” Scott Fellows’ exuberant boy-band-as-Monkees-as-Looney-Tunes Nickelodeon series, that finds its stars trying to get home to Minnesota. Guests include Miranda Cosgrove, from “iCarly,” and the bizarrely wholesome Snoop Dogg, who helps the boys cut a new version of “The 12 Days of Christmas.” Tragedy briefly strikes when they are told, “ Justin Bieber just released ’50 Days of Christmas’ with 50 Cent. It’s over eight hours long, and it’s a masterpiece.”

robert.lloyd@latimes.com