TV Talk: CMU grad, ‘Pretty Little Liars’ alum stars in Christmas programs

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

PASADENA, Calif. — Actor Ian Harding graduated from Carnegie Mellon University’s acting program in 2010 and didn’t have to pay his dues waiting tables, as many actors do. Instead, he was almost immediately cast in what would turn into a hit cable series, “Pretty Little Liars,” which ran from 2010-17.

Harding, who stars in the Christmas-themed series “Holidazed,” streaming its first two episodes Thursday on Hallmark+, said “PLL” was not his first on-camera experience. His first on-camera gig was for a Sheetz commercial he filmed while studying at CMU.

“Sheetz was rolling out cappuccino makers, so the idea was I was in an old beatnik coffee shop,” which Harding said made sense. But then Sheetz decided to also promote its smoothies in the same TV ad, which didn’t really fit the coffeehouse vibe. “So I was in a black turtleneck, I had long hair, and I was trying to sell smoothies. It was hilarious, which I guess was the point.”

After that ad, Harding was cast as “wealthy prepster” in the filmed-in-Pittsburgh 2009 movie “Adventureland,” which shot at Kennywood. The film’s director, CMU grad Greg Mottola, asked Harding to read “Adventureland” star Ryan Reynolds’ part at the table read when Reynolds couldn’t attend.

“So I was reading with Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, it was a huge learning experience,” Harding said.

Because “PLL” was the first pilot Harding ever auditioned for in Los Angeles, he didn’t get the typical post-college actor experience until seven years after his college graduation, when “PLL” ended.

“There was a huge amount of imposter syndrome,” he said, noting that his “PLL” role precluded him from taking many other jobs during the show’s run. “We were shooting nine-to-10 months out of the year. I got to pay off my college debt. I got to craft a life and learn how to be on a set. It felt restricting at times, but then also it was the chance of a lifetime, right?”

Then came the cold reality of the actors’ life post-“PLL.”

“The first pilot that I auditioned for that season, I got and it was this huge Fox comedy (pilot),” Harding said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, wow, here we go.’ And then it immediately died in the water” — meaning, didn’t get picked up as a series — “I didn’t work for eight months.”

The eight-episode “Holidazed,” filmed in 2022 and held for this year’s launch of Hallmark+, focuses on several families living on the same cul-de-sac (shades of “Knots Landing”), each celebrating the season differently. Harding plays Josh, who returns home to spend Christmas with his parents without his fiancé in tow; he has a tension-filled meet-cute with a local police officer who was his high school classmate. The series gives Harding a chance to lean more into comedy than the drama of “PLL.”

“I could see from the first few pages (of the script) that there was a clear perspective on who this guy was,” Harding said. “I understood the cadence and how he talked — down to the punctuation. … It was very freeing and liberating to do something, A, that I got to keep all my clothes on for, and, B, it didn’t feel forced. It didn’t feel needlessly saccharine.

“And because we got multiple episodes, as opposed to telling a story in 80 minutes like a usual movie,” he continued, “we were able to flesh out moments. I had a blast and would do another one of these in a heartbeat.”

“Holidazed” marks Harding’s third project with Hallmark. Next year he’ll star in “Ripple,” a Hallmark+ series about four strangers whose lives begin to intersect.

“Holidazed” is not Harding’s only Christmas-themed project this month. He also stars opposite Lindsay Lohan in Netflix’s “Our Little Secret,” streaming Nov. 27. Lohan and Harding play resentful exes who must spend Christmas together after learning their new partners are siblings.

‘Finding Mr. Christmas’

Now streaming its first three episodes on Hallmark+ (new episodes debut Thursdays), Jonathan Bennett (“Mean Girls”) hosts “Finding Mr. Christmas,” a cheeky reality competition to discover the next Hallmark holiday hunk who will co-star in the upcoming movie “Happy Howlidays” (8 p.m. Dec. 21, Hallmark Channel).

“Finding Mr. Christmas” is pretty much what you’d expect: a light-hearted show where models, actors and everyday guys compete in two challenges per episode. In the first they go “toe to mistletoe” in a test of their holiday spirit and in the second “star quality” challenge, the guys film scenes with familiar Hallmark movie stars.

It’s cute if unexceptional.

Melissa Peterman co-hosts with Bennett, who also created the series.

“I’m a huge reality (TV) freak,” Bennett said in July during a Hallmark Media party that was part of the Television Critics Association summer 2024 press tour. “I have so many friends that always want to be in Hallmark movies. And I was like, ‘What if we did, like, ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ meets ‘The Bachelorette’ at Christmas,’ and that’s where the idea of this came from.”

For the show’s screen test challenges, Bennett went with scenarios that will be familiar to Hallmark viewers.

“We took all the tropes of a Hallmark Christmas movie: the meet cute, the apology scene, the photo shoot,” he said. “We know what a Hallmark star looks like. It’s why viewers come to our network movie after movie, because our stars and our hunks have that je ne sais quoi thing about them. You can’t explain what it is, but they have the thing that makes you sit up in your chair when you watch TV. And that’s what we were looking for.”