TV Talk: Holiday TV movies rev up as ‘Christmas on Wheels’ rolls onto Lifetime

Again this year Hallmark Channel and Lifetime started televising Christmas movies the weekend before Halloween and Netflix dropped its first holiday-themed rom-com a few days later.

Ambridge native Marita Grabiak directed Lifetime’s “Christmas on Wheels” (8 p.m. Saturday), [11/14] the story of a woman (Tiya Sircar, “The Good Place”) who returns to her hometown and discovers her uncle sold her mom’s red convertible. She teams up with her uncle’s attorney (Michael Xavier) to track the car down in hopes of buying it back.

Grabiak has directed 17 Christmas movies, most of them for Hallmark Channel, and she also directs episodes of prime-time dramas, including most recently installments of Fox’s “9-1-1” and “9-1-1: Lone Star.”

She says there are a few key differences between directing cable movies and broadcast episodes: With low-budget movies she’s often able to be involved from the ground up, working alongside a screenwriter and having a hand in casting. For more lucrative ongoing series work, the director parachutes in for an episode but also gets a much bigger budget to work with.

“I love variety in my life,” she said in an October interview while visiting her mother, Jane, in Ambridge. “It’s one of the reasons I chose the profession I did.”

Grabiak’s Hollywood career included a stint as script supervisor on NBC hit “ER” in its early seasons before Grabiak transitioned to directing episodes of TV dramas and then into cable movies in 2011.

Grabiak said Christmas movies fall into two buckets: Those that are pre-sold to a specific network and those that are produced independently and then sold to a network.

“I tend to like when they’re not pre-sold because I get to work more independently and choose my own locations and wardrobe and cast,” she said, noting with pre-sold titles there’s more network involvement and oversight.

“Christmas on Wheels” was one of the first productions to get up and running after the Hollywood production shutdown due to the covid-19 pandemic, filming for three weeks in Ottawa beginning July 7th (almost all Christmas movies film in the summer, requiring the manufacturing of fake snow).

While scouting locations for a flat field to use as a backdrop for a driving scene, Grabiak stumbled upon a Victorian farmhouse that was ultimately used as the exterior and interior of Uncle Tony’s house after the home’s owners agreed to rent it out.

The car used in the film was inspired by an Ambridge neighbor’s red Cadillac convertible Grabiak recalls from her childhood. Finding just the right vehicle came down to the wire when the film’s transportation captain located a 1964 red Cadillac convertible in Hamilton, Ontario, that was transported to set on a flatbed truck.

While viewers are accustomed to certain story beats in Christmas movie rom-coms, the pandemic required adjustments. Though “Christmas on Wheels” has the requisite happy ending, there is no kiss.

“That became a big question mark,” Grabiak said. “The executive producer asked me to feel out the situation with the actors” to gauge their levels of comfort. Neither one was keen on a kiss but negotiations over a hug and dancing proved more fruitful.

Despite a robust roster of TV series production in Pittsburgh, Grabiak has yet to achieve her goal of directing in her hometown despite “Mindhunter” filming scenes “two blocks away from my parents’ house.”

“I’d like to retire here,” Grabiak said, “so it would be great to be able to go to work here.”

‘Jingle Jangle’

This year Hallmark boasts 40 new Christmas movies across two networks, Lifetime offers 34 and Netflix debuts seven new film entries, including writer/director David E. Talbert’s big-budget musical “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey,” streaming Friday.

Very much in the mold of “The Greatest Showman,” it’s the story of an inventor, Jeronicus Jangle (Forest Whitaker), his apprentice-turned-rival Gustafson (Keegan-Michael Key) and granddaughter, Journey (Madalen Mills), who helps Jeronicus regain his mojo for invention with the aid of a Wall-E-style robot.

With a sumptuous color-saturated Steampunk production design, “Jingle Jangle” is both overlong (it has a two-hour running time) and at times underdeveloped, particularly Jeronicus’ relationship with his daughter (Anika Noni Rose), which only comes into play in the film’s last act.

Still, the musical numbers and choreography are high-caliber efforts that make this family-friendly effort worthwhile.

‘Alex Rider’

Free, ad-supported streamers (e.g. Pluto TV, Tubi TV) offer mostly reruns but Amazon-owned IMDb.tv is getting into the original series business with the launch of teen spy drama “Alex Rider,” already renewed for a second season.

Based on the second entry in a book series by author Anthony Horowitz, the TV version of “Alex Rider” follows likeable high schooler Alex (Otto Farrant) as he’s recruited by British secret intelligence to go undercover at a boarding school in the French Alps.

Streaming Friday, the first two episodes deliver a lot of setup as Alex’s world is ripped apart before he’s set on his path to becoming a spy. The plot mechanics are fairly predictable and it takes the show too long to get where it’s clearly going.

WQED explores ‘Adultification’

WQED-TV premieres “Childhood Lost: The Adultification of African American Girls” (8 p.m. Nov. 18), a 30-minute documentary written and produced by Minette Seate about misperceptions of African-American girls as more adult, aggressive and sexually mature and less in need of support than their white counterparts.

KDKA-TV anchor departs

KDKA-TV weekend morning anchor Lisa Washington departs the station this week after five-and-a-half years to become the weekday 6, 7, 10 and 11 p.m. anchor at WNEP, the ABC affiliate in Scranton. No word on who will take her place at KDKA.

Channel surfing

Season four of Netflix’s “The Crown” drops Sunday. … ABC ordered a prime-time, celebrity edition of “Wheel of Fortune” (8 p.m. Jan. 7) … The last “Jeopardy!” episode hosted by Alex Trebek, who died on Sunday, will air on Christmas Day. It was taped on Oct. 29. MeTV re-airs Trebek’s guest appearances Friday on “Mama’s Family” (9 p.m.) and “Cheers” (9:30 p.m.). … Following in the footsteps of the station’s on-air talent, KDKA-TV’s behind-the-scenes producers announced their intention to unionize with SAG-AFTRA this week and want to be included in the same bargaining unit as reporters/anchors……. Visitation for the late pioneering Pittsburgh broadcaster Eleanor Schano, who died Monday of covid-19, will be held 2-4 and 6-8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at William Slater II Funeral Services, 1650 Greentree Road, Scott Township. A Mass of Christian burial will be held at 1:30 p.m. Monday [11/16] at St. Paul Cathedral at 5th Avenue and N. Craig Street in Oakland.