“It’s clean and I just don’t enjoy cussing,” a Georgia grandma told E! News in October. While every other channel is losing viewers to Netflix, Hallmark-which calls itself “the heart of TV”-is commanding almost as much attention as the news. According to the Post, Hallmark’s ratings surged in 2015 when Donald Trump arrived on the political landscape and have continued to soar since, with a number of husbands joining the predominantly female demographic. Its audience loudly touts traditional family values and charity while less loudly opposing multiculturalism, gender fluidity, and homosexuality.

This particular tranquilizer is designed specifically for a white, conservative audience, enveloping the parade of Pleasantvilles in a sinister frame.

But Abbott, it seems, has mistaken sedation for pleasure. “We are a place you can go and feel good,” Bill Abbott, the CEO of Crown Media, which owns the Hallmark Channel, recently told the Washington Post. There’s even a flour fight during a baking scene, all of which adds up to a series of vaguely animated stock images you may find by googling the word “wholesome.” Everything-the acting, the set, the story-is as flatly palatable as, well, a Hallmark card. Here, the houses are cut out of catalogues, the kids look like young Republicans, and Happy the dog gets top billing. “Our lives couldn’t be more different,” one-it barely matters which-exclaims as their interchangeable, white-as-snow narratives are mildly shaken up like a marked-down snow globe.

I was disturbed to find myself moderately engaged by Switched for Christmas, the most-viewed Hallmark telecast in history (5.8 million viewers, including me), which stars Candace Cameron Bure as a pair of barely human twin tropes-city slicker, country bumpkin-who pull a Parent Trap for the holidays. It is a mild, innocuous soporific propped up by a staged, suburban, pseudo-elegant scene populated by a large number of nice-looking white people. W atching a Hallmark movie is like taking half a benzo in an Ikea showroom in the middle of Stockholm.

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