Dolly Parton's Christmas on the Square (2020)

Dolly Parton played an angel in a Christmas musical she wrote 14 songs for, got it greenlit at Netflix by performing a 45-minute live version for executives who bought it in the room, and then won an Emmy for it. If you need to know anything else about Dolly Parton's Christmas on the Square, it's probably just the plot.

Regina Fuller (Christine Baranski) returns to the small town of Fullerville after her father's death. She has no interest in nostalgia. She wants to sell the land to a mall developer, evict every tenant her father housed, and leave before Christmas. This is, essentially, a Scrooge story with square dancing. An angel, played by Dolly herself in a sequined coat that belongs in a museum, keeps showing up to nudge Regina toward her better self.

What Dolly Parton Actually Did Here

The origin story of this film is more interesting than most reviews bother to mention. Producer Sam Haskell wrote a short Christmas story and pitched it to Parton. She told him to turn it into a musical, and then she went and wrote all the songs herself. Not one or two. Fourteen. Across multiple years of working on the project.

The production shot in Atlanta in the summer of 2019, wrapped into post-production, and finished in January 2020, weeks before the pandemic shut everything down. It premiered on Netflix on November 22, 2020, when audiences needed exactly this kind of aggressively cheerful comfort viewing.

Parton also released versions of two of the film's songs, "Christmas Is" and "Christmas on the Square," on her 2020 album A Holly Dolly Christmas. She was promoting a Netflix movie and a Christmas album simultaneously, mid-pandemic, while also donating $1 million to Vanderbilt University to fund COVID-19 research. Dolly Parton contains multitudes.

The Christmas on the Square Cast and What They Do With It

Christine Baranski plays Regina as a woman who has spent decades building a fortress of ice around a real wound. It's a familiar archetype, but Baranski doesn't coast on the formula. She knows exactly how much to hold back so that when the thaw comes, it registers. She's been the cold antagonist in enough prestige television that she can do this in her sleep, but she doesn't.

Jenifer Lewis plays the town pastor with the kind of confident authority that makes you wonder why she isn't in more things. Treat Williams is the old flame Regina left behind. The supporting cast fills out the town with just enough specificity that Fullerville feels like a place rather than a set.

Parton herself appears in several scenes as an angel who isn't quite human but isn't quite not. She doesn't overpower the film. She orbits it, which is the right call. The film knows that too much Dolly in one place would unbalance everything else.

Debbie Allen and the Choreography That Won an Emmy

Debbie Allen, a three-time Emmy and Golden Globe winner, directed and choreographed the film. At the 2021 Creative Arts Emmy Awards, she took home the Emmy for Outstanding Choreography for Scripted Programming. The sequences she built for this material are ambitious: big ensemble numbers in a town square, intimate moments that break into song without warning, a full gospel scene that plays like it wandered in from a different and possibly better film.

The choreography is the main reason this works as a musical rather than just a TV movie with songs attached. There's actual staging happening, actual decisions being made about where bodies are in space and what that means. It lifts the whole production.

Is It a Good Christmas Movie?

It is a very good Christmas movie and a slightly imperfect film. The Scrooge structure means you know every beat before it happens. Regina will soften. The town will be saved. The old flame will be rekindled. The angel will smile and vanish. None of this is a spoiler because it's the genre.

What keeps it from being generic is the music and the commitment everyone brings to the material. When Baranski sings, she's not doing the half-spoken celebrity singing that often passes in these productions. She performs. Lewis performs. Parton performs as if the camera is a concert audience of fifty thousand people.

The film won the Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie at the 2021 Creative Arts Emmy Awards. It was Dolly Parton's first Emmy. The award was deserved, though perhaps not for the reasons that awards usually go to the things that win them. Christmas on the Square earned it by being exactly what it promised and delivering that promise with more craft and more heart than anyone expected from a Netflix holiday musical filmed in an Atlanta summer.