Watched 02/07/2025
Format: Hallmark
Viewing: First
Director: Don McCutcheon
new skill: solving crimes!
Man: Brennan Elliot
Job of Man: Detective
Goes to/ Returns to: Remains in NYC
Event: Crossword contest
Food: There are a lot of pastries seen, and deconstructed canapes
If you're a cord-cutter, you may not know that multiple Hallmark Channels exist on the cable spectrum. In the holiday season (1/4th the year), they kind of throw the intention of the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel out the window, pre-empting their cozy-mysteries format with Christmas movies.
But the rest of the year, the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries network is dedicated to movie series in which women solve mysteries. The movie-series idea harkens back to network TV movies of the 1990's, when we'd get, like, Perry Mason movies with Raymond Burr, with a recurring character, set-up, and supporting players.*
I was previously aware of these movies as, in my occasional channel surfing, I'd seen they had really wild titles like "Garage Sale Mysteries" and "Murder, She Baked". In their wildest dreams, SNL writers were not cooking this up. But I also hadn't seen any of them. However, when I was figuring out how many movies Ms. Lacey Chabert was responsible for, I stumbled across "The Crossword Mysteries" series - 5 films in all.
Yeah. So. I guess the deal is we're mixing in hobbies of the Hallmark audience with genre TV, and while it may seem silly on its face, I watch approximately 10,000 hours of superhero content every year. Let people like what they like.
First, I don't do the crossword, but Jamie does. Every day, Jamie does a crossword puzzle, and I participate by being asked for various words, and I rarely have any context for what I'm answering, but sometimes I help.
Second, after discussing something with a script as slipshod as Moonlight in Vermont, I was eager to see how Hallmark handled a mystery.
Mysteries hang together or they simply don't work. Sure, you can have bad characters or actors, but the plot itself, usually Hallmark's Achilles Heal, has to function. You can't really afford to have plot holes without the whole house of cards falling apart. You can have ambiguity, but the writer needs to know what happened so they can plant clues and the audience can play along as, say, Lacey Chabert runs around New York interfering in a police investigation.
Plus, I was just giddy at the idea of *murder* in a Hallmark movie. If we can mix this with a Christmas movie, I would be delighted.
To be honest, I was kind of pleasantly surprised by this movie. It's a regular 'ol mystery movie and the crossword fits in organically. In some other world, this is the mid-90's and they spent $30 million and this is just called "Crossword". The poster features an extreme close-up of Chabert's face in grainy black and white with a crossword puzzle superimposed with an image of Brennan Elliot's silhouette running. In that version, there's rain and 5 days of shooting in actual New York.
But this is not that movie, this is Hallmark doing its best. In Toronto.
The basic idea is that Chabert is the newly appointed editor of the Absolutely-Not-the-New York Times crossword puzzle. An art gallery is broken into and the owner is shot and killed. In his pocket: a crossword filled out with just a few "across" entries, in ink, and in cursive. Chabert learns about this and finds it very curious and tries to talk to the detective running the case (Brennan Elliot). Man dismisses Chabert's theory as bananas for reasons that are to keep the movie going, and Chabert gets involved as she works to solve the mystery of the puzzle.
Multi-decade TV staple Barbara Niven co-stars as Chabert's aunt, a society lady with connections everywhere.
Is it stupid? No! As I say, this is a mostly functional mystery movie and Chabert and Elliot are some of the better talent you can cook up for one of these movies. The script works, the mystery is not easily solved, and it feels like they spent some money.
It is wild to see Hallmark leaking in around the edges of a murder movie. Like, of course there's a bakery involved. But the overall idea is no less goofy than any TV movie mystery, and feels just clever enough to be out of reach of feebs like me. And they know to throw red herrings so you haven't solved the whole mystery just by eye-balling the various roles in the movie.
There's even a scene where Chabert has acting options and I think she kinda nails it, reminding the audience, she's not a super cop, she's a puzzle editor.
Speaking of puzzles, if I had one beef with the movie, it's that they rarely say "crossword". They say "puzzle". If you took a drink every time they say puzzle, you'd be dead by the 15 minute mark. And they just keep saying puzzle. Kind of to the point where, you know, if you keep saying a word, it feels like it loses all meaning.
Puzzle.
The movie definitely ends not on a cliff-hanger, but without sealing any deals between Chabert and Man, so I guess they knew they were going to keep making these. Since I have to watch four more, I guess I'm glad I was pretty okay with the characters and set-up.
Anyway, here's Hallmark, catering to the puzzle-fiends out there. I have no idea how they tie four more crimes into crossword puzzles, but here we are.
The three weirdest things in this movie were (1) the stop for a ping-pong break, (2) I think Chabert had the same jacket in three colors, and (3) the deconstructed canape served in a cocktail glass at a funeral. I was staring at a table full of them, utterly baffled by what I was looking at, stopped and rewound the movie, then paused the movie to get up, pointing at the TV asking Jamie "what IS that?" (this is what it's like to watch TV in our house). And then there was a whole little scene where Chabert's character specifically says "that is a canape". And I have no idea why any of that happened. It was related to nothing, and it was not identifiable in any way as a canape.
*I think this would be a really interesting way for, like, Netflix to translate things like the Richard Stark-penned Parker novels, which don't need to be 8-episode arcs. Just dump a new movie every once in a while.
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