Could Hanukkah reveals be the brand new stars of the vacation season?
Of course, it could sound like a ridiculous thought to recommend. There are dozens, if not a whole bunch, of Christmas packages that discover their manner onto our screens every season, from classics like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” to newer entries. The Hallmark Channel alone has dozens of Christmas movies on faucet for the 2023 vacation season.
But there’s additionally a rising canon of programming tied to Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish competition of lights that kicked off this yr on Thursday evening. Hallmark has been an enormous a part of the push, having launched a collection of Hanukkah motion pictures in recent times, together with “Double Holiday” (2019); “Holiday Date” (2019); “Love, Lights, Hanukkah!” (2020); “Eight Gifts of Hanukkah” (2021); and “Hannukah on Rye” (2022).
This yr, Hallmark provides one other to its Hanukkah canon with “Round and Round” — a “Groundhog Day”-style story through which a lady is trapped in a time loop and retains reliving her dad and mom’ Hanukkah social gathering. The movie debuts on Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern/Pacific.
Hallmark’s Hanukkah movies have discovered a large viewership. Last yr, “Hanukkah on Rye” attracted an viewers of 1.6 million viewers on its preliminary day of launch, based on Nielsen, the scores service. That put it nearly on par with a brand new Hallmark Christmas movie launch, “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” which drew 2 million viewers.
Hulu
DIS,
has additionally gotten in on the Hanukkah act. Last yr, it debuted “Menorah in the Middle,” a food-themed rom-com set in a Jewish bakery. (The Hanukkah menorah — or hanukkiah — is a key image of the vacation.)
And that’s to say nothing of the various Hanukkah packages which might be changing into classics in their very own proper: In a latest story, The Forward, a Jewish publication, cited greater than a dozen examples, from “A Rugrats Chanukah” (1996) to a Hanukkah-themed episode of the favored sitcom “Friends” (2000).
Oh, and let’s not neglect Adam Sandler and the varied variations of his “Hanukkah Song” — not a “program” per se, however a pop-culture zeitgeist that celebrates quite a few Jewish stars. (“David Lee Roth lights the menorah…”).
Sandler mentioned he wrote the tune in order that Jewish youngsters didn’t really feel unnoticed on the vacation. And certainly, there was a time — say, a era in the past — when there was little to no idea of Hanukkah leisure, save for a few kiddie songs.
“When I was growing up in the 1980s, I just understood that growing up Jewish in America meant being underrepresented in pop culture in general, but especially this time of year,” mentioned Esther Kustanowitz, co-host of an award-winning Jewish-centric pop-culture podcast referred to as The Bagel Report.
So, what modified? Kustanowitz factors to at least one key issue: the recognition of Jewish-themed content material basically. If something, Hanukkah is simply an extension of the pattern. Consider the recognition of a Jewish-themed collection like Amazon
AMZN,
Prime’s Emmy Award-winning “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Or the Jewish characters or storylines in different latest hit reveals, from “Broad City” to “Orange Is the New Black.”
It speaks to a broader thought — particularly, the rising multicultural sensibility of America, specialists notice. It’s not nearly Hanukkah — it’s additionally in regards to the holidays of different faiths, from Ramadan (a key occasion on the Islamic calendar) to Diwali (a vacation noticed by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists), all of that are receiving elevated recognition on this nation.
The concept that “everyone celebrates Christmas is finally ebbing away, and so are the TV execs who believe that,” mentioned Eric Silver, inventive head at Multitude Productions, a podcast producer.
You can also’t ignore how the media panorama has modified, argues Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. In the times when the TV world was dominated by three main networks, packages about faiths and cultures exterior the mainstream had little probability of discovering their place on the desk. But with the appearance of cable, after which streaming programming, “there’s so much more real estate…there are so many more tables,” he mentioned.
Thompson makes one other level: At this stage, the Christmas story and the well-known fictional Christmas characters, resembling Santa, Rudolph and Scrooge, are so entrenched that audiences could also be in search of one thing new and completely different. That leaves extra room for tales about one other vacation.
Hanukkah is “absolutely untrounced territory,” Thompson mentioned.
Source web site: www.marketwatch.com
