Hallmark’s Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story is less rom-com, more literal love for football merch

Courtesy Hallmark

It’s finally here! Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, the long-awaited Chiefs-centric, regionally-shot Hallmark Christmas movie, premiered November 30. In the interest of letting you all draw your own conclusions about this deeply silly bit of holiday entertainment, we decided to wait until after it aired to run our thoughts.

So, now that we’ve seen it, what do we think?

First, let’s not confuse Holiday Touchdown with the OTHER recent Chiefs-inspired holiday romance, Lifetime’s Christmas in the Spotlight. The Lifetime movie borrows from the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce romance currently sacking the nation’s hearts (did I do that right?). Holiday Touchdown simply cashes in on Chiefs fandom and Kansas City’s love of telling the rest of the country how awesome we are.

Don’t come to the Hallmark movie expecting a tale of star-crossed pop idol/football idol romance. 

Holiday Touchdown follows the Hallmark playbook, with some twists. Hallmark movies typically follow a big-city woman who lands in a quaint burg where a hot, down-to-earth man trying to save his family’s business convinces her to give up her dreams and come live the small-town life. In Holiday Touchdown, it’s the woman trying to support her family’s store and the man who’s a high-powered professional in need of a folksy values check. The woman loves football, and the man can barely throw a spiral.

If this is the TV movie version of feminism, congratulations, ladies! Parity achieved!

Alana Higman (Hunter King) comes from a dynasty of die-hard Chiefs fans. Her grandparents met and became friends when they gifted their families Chiefs season tickets in 1969. That friendship led to the marriage of Alana’s parents (Diedrich Bader and Megyn Price), and Alana, who’s the heir apparent to the family’s Chiefs-centric store in downtown Independence (the movie is weirdly focused on Arrowhead and Independence as locations, the rest of KC barely figures, which is very funny).

Alana hopes to get her family’s store some publicity by winning the Chiefs Fan of the Year competition (a real thing!), overseen by the team’s new director of fan engagement (a real job! Kind of), Derrick (Tyler Hynes). Derrick got this job despite caring nothing at all about the Chiefs or football. But he’s a white dude with a positive attitude and a smile that just won’t quit, so he’s a perfect fit, obviously. Alana’s up against stiff competition, including real-life Instagram celebrity Sly James the Cat, but y’all know how this goes. Our girl will win that contest and Derrick’s heart, all in time for Christmas.

One of my favorite bits of internet writing is Willie VerSteeg’s “Early Draft of Hallmark Movie Screenplay: Christmas for Christmas,” which recycles the words “Christmas,” “work,” “cookies” and “snow” in various iterations to complete the plot of a Hallmark Christmas Movie. Holiday Touchdown does something similar, only here the keywords are “football,” “Chiefs,” and “family,” with “Christmas” being second-tier, right next to “barbecue.” 

Speaking of meat, Derrick first meets Alana when he visits her grandparents’ barbecue joint (where he’s served by Donna Kelce!) on a colleague’s recommendation. Usually, when a new arrival asks where they should check out some smoked meat, the recommendations are Gates, Arthur Bryant’s, or Joe’s (the Johnson County outlier). Independence is nowhere on that list, but props to Hallmark for creating a regionally-specific plot contrivance.

Courtesy Hallmark

This gets at Holiday Touchdown’s biggest issue (other than a side plot involving a lucky hat that Alana’s family invest waaaaay too much of their mental health in): its insistence on setting most of the movie in downtown Independence. While it’s close to Arrowhead, and the old-school main drag fits the small-town vibes of this genre, it is not representative of Kansas City by a long shot. Will non-Kansas Citians see Holiday Touchdown and decide they’d like to visit Independence because it looks like Mainstreet USA? They should be going to Weston or Parkville!

Apart from the weird inconsistencies (most of which just exist to make this more thoroughly a Hallmark Christmas Movie), Holiday Touchdown is honestly pretty charming. It’s cheesy in a way that’s fun to laugh at, and plays enough to our civic pride that anyone with their fair share of Kansas City or Chiefs tchotchkes will find something to smile at. Mine was the moment when Alana’s invited to sit in the Chiefs owner’s box with the Hunts, but turns it down so she can sit in her family’s traditional spot—because she’s a real one.

It’s hard to think of a movie like this working as well with another city/team combination.

Could a Philadelphia/Eagles Hallmark movie work? Silver Linings Playbook exists, but that movie was Oscar bait, not a 90-minute piece of holiday fluff.

A Boston/Patriots movie? Not without a lot of justified hatred from the rest of the country.

Holiday Touchdown works precisely because of Kansas City’s heartland location and midwestern mindset, along with the team’s recent victories and pop culture status. This may be the beginning of a bigger partnership between Hallmark and the NFL, but it’s hard to believe it’s going to get better than this.