The Christmas Consultant (2013)

Lifetime aired The Christmas Consultant on November 10, 2012, and by all accounts the ratings were so dismal that the network had no plans to repeat it. Then The Soup got hold of it. Joel McHale's clip show did what it did to so many Lifetime originals: it turned low viewership into cult notoriety, and suddenly Lifetime was scheduling additional airings of a movie it had quietly written off. That arc, from obscurity to camp phenomenon, tells you almost everything you need to know about what kind of film this is.

What 'The Christmas Consultant' Is Actually About

Maya Fletcher (Caroline Rhea) is a perfume executive who has just relocated her family for her career. Her husband Jack (Barclay Hope) is equally overextended. They have children who need attention, in-laws descending for the holidays, and a boss to impress with a Christmas party at the new house, which is not yet a home in any meaningful sense. Someone, somewhere, suggests the obvious solution: hire Owen (David Hasselhoff), a professional Christmas consultant, to handle it all.

Owen arrives and proceeds to do what every magical-helper figure in a Lifetime Christmas movie does. He decorates. He bakes. He wrangles children. He fixes the marriage by proximity. He is warm, competent, and mildly mysterious, which in the logic of this genre means he is concealing grief. His wife died five years earlier, and he invented a fictional family to manage the loss. The movie handles this revelation with the delicacy of a sledgehammer wrapped in tinsel.

Nobody watches this film for the screenplay.

The Hasselhoff Question

The interesting casting decision here is not that Hasselhoff is in a Lifetime Christmas movie. By 2012 he had already appeared on a Comedy Central Roast, been the first celebrity eliminated from Dancing with the Stars Season 11, and spent a decade accumulating the kind of career that gets described as "eclectic" in polite company. Lifetime movies were a natural destination.

The interesting decision is casting him as Owen. The Christmas consultant is supposed to be a sentimental, domestically gifted figure: someone who genuinely loves garland and understands the emotional weight of a properly hung stocking. Hasselhoff is not that. His screen presence is too large, too self-aware, too fundamentally Hasselhoff to disappear into the role. The SF Gate review from 2012 put it precisely: he was miscast, but he makes the film more fun than it probably should be.

That is the correct read. Watching Hasselhoff earnestly explain the importance of a particular Christmas ornament placement is funnier than anything the script attempts on purpose. He commits to Owen with the same energy he brought to Michael Knight and Mitch Buchannon, which is to say, complete sincerity at a volume slightly too high for the material. It doesn't work as drama. It works as entertainment.

Caroline Rhea Deserves Better, and Also This Is Fine

Rhea is a genuinely skilled comedic performer. She spent six seasons as Hilda Spellman on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, hosted The Biggest Loser for its first two seasons, and built a stand-up career before any of that. She is not slumming here exactly, but the script does not give her much to work with beyond "stressed mother learns to slow down," which is the engine of approximately half of all Lifetime Christmas movies ever produced.

She is better than the material. She finds moments of genuine warmth, particularly with the child actors, and manages the transition from harried executive to reformed holiday enthusiast without making it feel completely unearned. The film would be substantially less watchable without her.

The Lifetime Christmas Movie as Genre

Director John Bradshaw has made a career of television movies, and The Christmas Consultant follows the Lifetime Christmas template with almost clinical precision. There is a family under pressure, a magical outsider, a secret that creates a false intimacy and then a manufactured conflict, and a resolution in which everyone stands around a Christmas tree. The formula exists because it works at a biochemical level: it delivers comfort, familiarity, and low-stakes emotion on a schedule.

The Christmas Consultant is not a particularly good example of the genre. The pacing is uneven, the grief subplot is underdeveloped, and the party that drives the whole plot lands with less impact than the setup promises. But it earned its camp reputation honestly. There is something genuinely strange about watching Hasselhoff, the man who sang "Looking for Freedom" to half a million Berliners from a crane above the Brandenburg Gate on New Year's Eve 1989, meticulously arranging Christmas stockings in a suburban living room for a Lifetime audience of hundreds.

That strangeness is the film's actual appeal. It wasn't planned. It can't be manufactured. It just happened.