‘The Christmas Blessing,” a sentimental new CBS drama starring Neil Patrick Harris, Rebecca Gayheart and Angus T. Jones (“Two and a Half Men”), is aptly named for any viewers who are going through sugarplum withdrawal.
This Sunday sequel to the highly rated 2002 holiday drama “The Christmas Shoes” finds Nathan Andrews (Harris), the boy from “Shoes,” now grown up and working as a medical resident. Nathan’s work has impressed his hospital colleagues, but the unexpected death of a patient sends him into a depression and leads him to take a break and move back home with his widowed father.
His homecoming is a little rocky, however. Not only has Nathan’s father some-how lost the shoes Nathan had struggled so hard to get for his dying mother in the earlier movie, but the older man is plan-ning to sell the family home and business and start a new life in the South.
These events shake up Nathan, but he begins to get a new perspective from Megan (Gayheart), a vivacious teacher he meets and begins to date, as well as young Charlie (Jones), one of her students who has lost his mother.
This being a holiday tear-jerker, however, Nathan scarcely has begun to try letting go of the past when he discovers that not one, but two of the people he loves most suffer from life-threatening medical conditions that only a Christmas Eve transplant can resolve.
Harris good-naturedly acknowledges that “The Christmas Blessing” lays on the melodrama pretty thickly in some respects. But then, with no big new Christmas-themed movies playing in theaters this year, audiences are having to rely on TV movies to tug their holiday heartstrings.
“Doing a Christmas TV movie, the cliches are probably a bit inevitable, but around Christmastime that’s just a little more palatable because you’re looking for a little saccharin in your coffee,” Harris says.
“I think a lot of people may find themselves at the home of loved ones without much going on. There will be a dinner evening event and perhaps some church-going, but other than that, aside from football, there isn’t a lot of structure, so the TV tends to be on a lot. I think it’s great, because it allows the movies to be a little more mainstream.”
Of course, “mainstream” also means appealing to as large an audience as possible, which only encourages a “too many cooks” situation as a Christmas movie goes into production.
“There’s a lot of people from the network and otherwise who put in their two cents about what ought to be in it,” Harris says. “The script has to answer to a lot of demographics: kids, grandparents, everyone. By the time the script got to us, it was kind of a cut-and-paste job.”
Harris says he and his cast mates worked with director Karen Arthur and the producers to keep the dialogue sounding natural and the action flowing as seamlessly as possible.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever spent more time on a movie doing that, because usually all that happens before you even get to the set,” he says. “I’m not saying that to cast a dark light on the making of this project, just to let you know that everyone involved had aspirations to make it something beyond a routine, cliched Christmas tear-jerker.”
