I am full of bad ideas.
Once, I went vegetarian for a full year just to prove that I could do it (it was a disaster, but short being force fed sausage pizza at a work meeting, I remained vegetarian all year).
I have decided to own every issue of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen and Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane.
To what end do I do these things? I do not know.
But, worse, sometimes someone else's bad ideas will land in my head, and I'll think "yes, I will do that thing", especially if it's absolutely pointless.
This post marks the end of ChabertQuest2025. It began as a germ of an idea that became a marathon. A Chabert-a-thon, if you will. And now I can put down my remote and put away my Christmas ornaments. We have done the thing we set out to do.
Some numbers:
- As of this writing, Lacey Chabert has 183 IMDB entries
- Of these credits, she has 87 live action feature films / TV films listed
- Of those, I was unable to locate 14, as they are not streaming or otherwise readily available.
- I refused to rewatch one of the movies because I'd already seen it and had a blog post about it
- Thus, since the holiday movie season began in November 2024, I have watched 72 separate movies in which Lacey Chabert appears.
Who we are and how we came to be
Last Christmas, rather than taking in a medley of new and classic Holiday movies as we usually do, we thought "we're doing all Hallmark." After all, we've seen all of the usual Christmas films a few dozen times. I can keep White Christmas a bit fresher if I don't sit through it every year. So we just leaned into what's usually something we'd normally catch pieces of, but don't always watch all the way through.
By the end of the holidays, I'd watched 9 Lacey Chabert holiday movies.
Why Chabert for my Christmas merriment? Well, not all Hallmark stars are of the same caliber.
Sorry, other actors. It's true.* There is absolutely a Hallmark talent pool of leads who get re-cast, over and over, and here at The Signal Watch, Lacey Chabert is considered better at the acting and festive thing than the average Hallmark bear. If you're going to watch one of these movies, might as well watch one that's not a dud.
Randy, who is not good for me, upon reviewing my Holiday movie post from 2024 said "now you should watch every Lacey Chabert movie". And I was like "ha ha. That's insane."
And then I was like: ha ha... that is insane.... maybe so insane it just might....
And here we are.
Who is Lacey Chabert?
 |
| she's this lady |
Lacey Chabert has been around since the start of the 1990's in film and television, first appearing as a child in a not-good TV movie with Kirk Cameron. I think this was after she appeared on Broadway in Les Miserables. She also was in commercials in the 90's. As she's from Mississippi, I have no idea how any of that happened.
After a lengthy career, she has become The Queen of Hallmark Christmas.
In these times of nichey media consumption, Lacey Chabert is maybe on the periphery of what makes a household name (I'd say 1/3rd of my pals had no idea who I was talking about), but many people know her and at least some of her work. Mostly, she's associated with her roles on Party of Five, in Mean Girls or her many movies on Hallmark. She's a name, but she's not doing Marvel movies or headlining projects like a ScarJo.
She is - as will be my thesis here - a working actor. And a "working actor" is something she's been since she was a child - and something she likely will still be when I'm pushing up daisies.
Here in 2025, she's in her 40's, a staple of TV movies, and has spent the past decade at the cable outlet, the Hallmark Channel, where she tends to appear in romantic comedies, especially at Christmas.
In 2024, Chabert jumped ship for a single Netflix movie, Hot Frosty, which became an enormous success. This occurred *just* after an executive stated they would replace Chabert as a featured star as she was "aging out". After the subsequent freak out by Hallmark fans - Hallmark ousted said executive and immediately signed Chabert to an exclusive deal. The package includes movies, a reality show, and a line of goods that will be sold in Hallmark stores. We hope she's making mad bank.
During her decades on screen, Chabert has kept out of the tabloids, and avoided infamy via shenanigans outside of her work - ie: she did not publicly melt down like so many child actors. Maybe in LA she's known for her salons and charity work, or maybe she's known for her week long benders where she shoots up an underground casinos. I don't really pay much attention to the private lives of currently living actors. But we salute her relative normalcy as a human.
Aside from feeling like Chabert generally elevates Hallmark projects, I did not arrive at ChabertQuest 2025 in full-blown Chabert fan mode. I'm not a Mean Girls fanatic. I've never seen more than a few minutes of Party of Five. Because I used to watch all the DC Comics cartoons, I was aware of her voicework for animation and games. But I basically missed her career for years before saying "hey, is that Lacey Chabert?" whilst flipping channels one Christmas a few years ago.
And, to me, my general unfamiliarity with her work made digging into the expansive filmography all the more interesting. I was coming in tabula rasa.
This ChabertQuest is, essentially, watching the work of an actor who - now in her 4th decade on screen, who has never thrown in the towel, survived in her chosen business, and now thrives.
So, at the risk of being reported to the FBI by her people, I embarked on this mission.
My rules:
- Use IMDB, JustWatch and some light Googling to make my list
- Watch only live action media - we did not get into cartoons where she lent her vocal talents, because I did not want to watch Bratz movies, movies for kids about fairies, etc...
- Watch only media that was feature length
- No short films
- No TV series
- Anything where Chabert appears in any capacity, from cameo to star, is fair game
- I would search for the movies, but I would not go to extraordinary lengths to obtain the movies
- I would not personally torrent movies
- I would not buy movies, just rent them via streaming platforms or as part of platforms I could easily obtain, such as Tubi or a free trial of a subscription
- I would write *something* about every movie watched. Essentially, I would create an entry from everything available, starting in roughly November 2024, to now
- If I already had an entry, from any point in the past, I was not rewatching that movie. This meant my laziness and aversion to writing up Hallmark movies came back to bite me a few times. But it also kept me from re-watching a single movie in the end... The Tree That Saved Christmas.
And so it began.
There was no plan
Looking back, I should have done this more intentionally. About 20 or 30 movies in, I realized "I have no idea what I will get out of this". Which made me start thinking a bit more about my approach. Because, dammit, we were not going to just do the sensible thing and stop.
Eventually I quit pulling names of movies off IMDB willy-nilly and put together the Chabert-a-Tron 3000, a list of all movies in the criteria, which helped a lot. With that, I started grouping movies a bit more by era, etc...
Bunching movies using a loose system did mean I had a rough patch of viewings from when Chabert was doing a lot of indie work. While she was good in everything (I'll discuss in a bit) the movies were sometimes not great. And when you watch, say, 10 movies that have been mostly forgotten as sometimes clumsy or clunky features, when something good does arrive, it feels like water at the end of a march through the desert. (See my post on The Brooke Ellison Story.)
I had no idea what I was putting on when I queued up at least half of the movies. I'd glance at a tagline or a look at a poster, but was mostly going by year, if the movies was indie or studio... things like that. And that, in itself, is an interesting exercise, with or without the promise of Lacey Chabert somewhere in your movie.
Should I go deep on the work of an individual again, I'll be more likely to think strategy beforehand, even if that strategy is just watching things in chronological order. But I also didn't particularly intend to watch this particular actor. There's nothing weird about her or anything inherently wacky about covering her, minus, maybe, having to commit to 40 Hallmark movies. And that's entirely on yours truly.
She's Kind of Done Everything
But really. She's famous for Hallmark now, but her career is all over the place.
Television movies (Gypsy). Long-running TV series (Party of Five). Created voices for cartoon superheroes and faeries and Bratz dolls. She's done indie features where she plays a hooker (The Pleasure Drivers, which I've yet to see). Gigantic studio summer blockbusters where she's a teen in space (Lost in Space). Raunchy comedies (Dirty Deeds). Depressing art house films (Reach for Me). She's run from mutant scarecrow monsters (Scarecrow). Been a multi-personality mental case (The Lost). She voiced Meg for the first season of Family Guy way back in the day.
Yes, for most of the the past decade, Chabert has been locked up with Hallmark, but prior to all that she was doing everything from psychological thrillers to horror to light comedy to Mean Girls.
Some folks fall into comedy, and that's what they do. Some get pegged as a horror movie scream queen. But Chabert bounced around doing anything and everything - and I have no idea if that was intentional or what happened, but it made for a wild ride for me as a human checking out her filmography. If watching all of these movies showed me anything, it's that Chabert is flexible and she can kind of get dropped into anything and make it work.
There's definitely a window in which Chabert was being cast as the hot-teen (when she was in her 20s), and then a hot twenty-something, and it's sometimes the most thankless part of her career. (On a housekeeping note - there are a lot of movies she was in around this time that were small, indies that are just missing right now unless you want a weird DVD collection.)
So, yes, if she made it over onto Hallmark for some light work and stayed, that's okay. She can point to a varied filmography and say she chose her lane. But not til she'd been in movies alongside all sorts of people, and was as averse to a single genre as any actor out there. Until, of course, viewers said "yes, we want to see this woman find love at Christmas. Every year. Maybe twice."
Six Degrees of Lacey Chabert
Here's kind of the kooky thing I was not expecting to think about a lot, but which became obvious as I went along. Thanks to her mainstream feature career, her TV career, and her work in indie film, Chabert has worked with some huge names.
Gypsy - Bette Midler, Elisabeth Moss, Tony Shaloub, etc...
Daddy Day Care - Eddie Murphy, Regina King, Anjelica Huston
Christmas Melody - Mariah Carey
Hot Frosty - Craig Robinson, Joe Lo Truglio
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - Michael Douglas, Anne Archer, Robert Forster, McConaughey
Lost in Space - Heather Graham, William Hurt, Mimi Rogers, Gary Oldman
Reach For Me - Alfre Woodard, Adrienne Barbeau, LeVar Burton
Mean Girls - Tina Fey, et al
Being Michael Madsen - Michael and Virginia Madsen
A New Wave - John Krasinski
Haul Out the Holly - Stephen Tobolowsky
Ghost of Goodnight Lane - Billy Zane
Shadow of Fear - James Spader, Peter Coyote
I haven't seen it, but she's in What if God Were the Sun? with Gena Rowlands.
And more, but you get the idea.
She hit her stride as the era of the movie star died off, but she managed to land lead or main roles by working in those indies. And in many of the indie films she was in, she was the lead, and in all of them, she was a featured character and often was prominently on the poster.
Maybe the oddest thing is that she's done at least three movies with Lauren Holly (Hot Frosty, Fatwa and The Pleasure Drivers). I have no idea if there's a connection. She's friends with, and works often with, Jonathan Bennett - according to her reality show, Celebrations. And she worked with Ed Asner as a child in Gypsy and again as an adult in the All of My Heart trilogy.
A Journey Through the Media Landscape
Chabert is about 7.5 years younger than me, so her career has tracked along with my memory of media pretty well. Some of the forms of media in which she appears don't really exist anymore, but because of what she was doing and when, watching as much of what she did was certainly a road trip through how media worked.
Her first IMDB entry is a TV movie made for the holidays starring Kirk Cameron. Shot on film but never released on film - it has a particular look as "telefilm" that was common. She was in a big production of Gypsy starring Bette Midler, another TV movie. But this sort of thing would never happen on network TV in 2025. The last time we saw anything like this was when the networks were doing live broadcasts of musicals for a while.
I won't ignore that she was on Party of Five for years, while Fox became a legitimate TV network instead of the interloping newcomer. And she showed up in a big budget sci-fi summer blockbuster with Lost in Space, that was intended to sell toys and start a franchise (and did neither - in much of the way of the pre-planned hits of the era).
Her turn into indie movies reflected the post-Tarantino boom in LA, with everyone thinking they had the right edge to their script and somehow it seemed like indie movies were falling from the trees like acorns in fall. And there's a certain look to so many of these, with white-walled apartments and a near DIY look as lead males are idiots and women are too often treated as nothing but props in the male stories.
She was in a studio movie that was probably used as evidence that putting money behind romcoms was a bad idea.
Eventually she turned to made-for-basic-cable movies, which is where she eventually did well.
She appeared in at least one SyFy Channel movie about a scary scarecrow monster. An ABC Family movie from ABC Family's lightly spicy era. General movies then sold to basic cable outlets. And, of course, she partook in the rise of the Hallmark Christmas movie, and assisted in establishing the Royalty movie as one of the genres.
I'll mention that for a huge swath of her live action performances, she's been appearing in stuff that is not supposed to be aimed at me. Hallmark is aimed at adult women, probably over 30, which is a demographic that is served by daytime talk, some reality programming, etc... but Lifetime and Hallmark were the yin and yang of basic cable moods - one making movies playing on fears and one making movies that were a cup of hot tea and a blanket.
I won't speculate too much if appearing there is looked down upon - but they aren't getting nominated for Golden Globes for A Christmas Wish.
Now she's helping to break up what the notion of a Hallmark movie even is with comedies like Haul Out the Holly.
As part of this, I also started looking at Hallmark Reddit, which has been a trip. Whatever criteria you think you have for critically consuming media is not on the table here. And despite any minor reputation I may have had as a consumer of Hallmark movies at Christmas, I kind of learned I don't really know all that much. There are connoisseurs of Hallmark movies, and they walk among us, looking like normal people. And, I'd argue, are not even representative of who is watching Hallmark based on stated preferences.
I've actually maintained a subscription to Hallmark+ throughout this journey, which led to watching all of The Chicken Sisters (which has no Chabert, but does star Sissy Spacek's daughter and several other people I like) and Lacey Chabert's Celebrations, a reality show where she throws a party at someone as much as for them. It was a good cool down to have on while I wrote blog posts.
Is she good?
Here's the thing...
Yes. Lacey Chabert is a very good actor. It's been her major professional path, and she clearly can walk onto a set and get it done.
But I think that - if all you've seen are Hallmark movies - you aren't getting the full picture, but would be fair as the last decade she has almost exclusively participated in Hallmark productions. As a brand, Hallmark seems to have the same bumpers they use at bowling alleys put down on the emotional range an actor can convey. And, because maybe the productions are run-and-gun small movies shot on essentially a TV production schedule where you're not getting Kubrick's 300 takes to get it right, maybe we're not seeing the most extensively rehearsed work. Instead, you're getting 3 takes and one for safety.
And still, in those productions, she does very well.
Prior to Hallmark, in all of those movies with major stars, it's interesting she doesn't just hold her own, she's a highlight. After Michael Douglas's performance, she's the second funniest part of romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. I think she's one of the funniest parts of Mean Girls. She's moving in The Brooke Ellison Story, and that's all acting confined to her eyes. She carries whole thrillers like Non-Stop and Imaginary Friend.
There's a reason Hallmark has wanted her as a leading actor. Chabert, like a few others, seems to know that you're allowed to imbue a character with a personality and life beyond smiling politely at Man. I've seen the casting, and in 4 out of five Hallmark movies, our leads look mostly like they don't know what to do with their hands, and so they stand stock still while smiling vacantly through a whole movie. With Chabert, there's an internal life to her character, even when the script doesn't offer up much more than the basics.
So what happened post-Mean Girls that Chabert's last big studio movie was in 2009? I don't know, and I honestly don't even really have any theories. I have guesses.
First guess: Chabert was part of a generation that was cycling through female talent, focusing on male leads and plugging in flavors of the week for romantic match-ups. Taking Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Jennifer Garner is now primarily a spokesperson for Capital One. Of the Mean Girls crew, Lindsay Lohan is getting to do a new Freaky Friday based more on people liking Jamie Lee Curtis and enough time passing than the raging success of her Netflix movies. And Rachel McAdams has been cast as Doctor Strange's Lana Lang, but she also appears here and there somewhat randomly.
Second guess: I think Hollywood will make dumb decisions like "everyone thinks of her as Gretchen Weiners" that they'll decide makes sense for a reason not to give someone other work, when that... is rarely how people actually deal with actors. No one said "Cate Blanchett is Queen Elizabeth, no one let her do anything else."
The bottom line is that I don't know. Could be anything. Maybe there's some dark secret.
I think she could - and can be - a great comedic actress. I enjoyed her a lot when she was able to cut loose a bit. She's even darkly funny in the otherwise very-much-a-horror-movie remake of Black Christmas. She's even kind of daffy in the Valentine's Day film she released this year, An Unexpected Valentine (but Hallmark rarely knows how to be lol funny).
It's possible that in the public's mind she got Mary-Ann'd - people wanted to make her The Girl Nextdoor in everything, even when she was clearly casting around during her 00's and 10's indie era looking to show range. That's how you get Black Christmas and The Lost.
But, ultimately, actors need steady work. Or to walk away from the business. And how many young women do you see in movies who leave the business? It's a lot.
As I said at the outset, my thesis is that Chabert is a case study in what it means to be a working actor.
She's had slow career eras. I'd be very curious why her filmography dries up in 2003, 2011 and 2012, for example, when she did just one live action film per year. She's been on a few TV shows that just didn't last and neither you nor I remember.
And, I will also not sugarcoat it. Some of the movies she did when just seeking out any old work are terrible. But that's no reflection on Chabert. If anything, she's a trooper for showing up and being the best part of many, many of the movies I sat through on this journey. A Holiday Heist is garbage, but she has one scene to actually act, and she nails it. Fatwa is a misguided mess, but she's terrific as the drug-fueled girl escaping her past.
All along, she's done voices for cartoons, worked on shorts, and done all sorts of things. Heck, I stumbled across the fact you can book her to be a speaker at your company's function. She is working.
Chabert could have walked away to start selling houses in Los Angeles or just vanish from the internet. But she didn't - she kept working. And she proved people would tune in. She's earned her spot creating a sort of recurring everywoman for many of the movies that the audience can relate to.
Folks online have their opinions about Hallmark movies, many of which are very fair if your taste runs to, say, Ryan Coogler's Sinners. But within the Hallmark framework, she also has tried branching out with mystery movies (The Crossword Mysteries series) and busting up the genre - take Haul out the Holly, which is a very silly comedy about insane people. And the cycle of All of My Heart is weirdly better than you'd expect. She spun off a reality show.
And, man, no matter what else - she's really made Hallmark work for her. No, you never saw all six Wedding Veil movies, but I did. And I saw her running around Europe in those movies. Or in Malta for The Dancing Detective. Or South Africa for Love on Safari. She's filmed Christmas movies in Rome, Ireland and Scotland. Groundswell was in Hawaii. There's more, but... you get it.
In the end, she's serving up stories that may be light and not set the world on fire, critically, but for many people, they serve a need. Not everyone needs Severance after a long day at the office. Not everyone needs to feel crushing nihilism as part of their post-dinner two hours of television. Sometimes watching some detective learn to dance is just what the doctor ordered.
My Chabert Journey
I started this by talking about how I take on pointless, longterm tasks. Going vegetarian. Collecting Jimmy Olsen comics.
But I kind of lied at the start. These things haven't been pointless.
When I went vegetarian, I learned things about eating, my own body, the (in)tolerance of others, and my own ability to do a thing once I set out to do it. Collecting Jimmy Olsen and, maybe especially Lois Lane, has become a study in representation over the 20 year print runs of each book - how women are portrayed, how masculinity is portrayed. I saw what happened in pop culture and culture over that span. I was stunned by what was taken as common knowledge at one time or another - even by the children intended to read a book. Art styles changed. Story telling changed.
What I have come to believe is that you don't know what one may learn simply by committing to as task, especially one that includes media consumption, and how media reflects and refracts the world. And especially-especially, one that doesn't seem to have obvious dividends.
Indeed, thanks to the 70-odd movies watched and the related blog posts that they generated, I spent maybe 200 hours pondering Lacey Chabert since November, 2024. If in doubt, consider 90 minutes per movie, add in the 30-45 minutes I had to write each post, the Googling, this blog post as well, the Chabert-a-Tron 3000... It's been a lot of time.
And I think I've kind of broken down the eras and what I saw above. Maybe. Hopefully.
I will also say: When you look at someone's work like this and start to try to figure it all out, try to contextualize what you saw, you build a respect for your subject.
Watching each movie as a discrete thing is fine - and the sane thing to do. But once you see someone's career as a whole, it paints a different picture of their life and their work. This may especially be true of someone who has been a child, teen, young adult, got married, had a child... all while working and making the movies you've been throwing on while on the elliptical.
At some point, Lacey Chabert was a child who wanted to be in plays and on television. Pretty early on, she just kept showing up and they kept casting her. Like many actors, sometimes she got lucky with where she landed, and sometimes she didn't. And she's ended up in a peculiar spot in her career that seems to have no expiration date.
And while even the fans know Hallmark is not turning out the next Citizen Kane, it'd be a shame to not salute Chabert for landing in a unique spot in the pop-culture consciousness. And acknowledge the road that got her here.
After 70-odd movies, I confess to feeling weirdly defensive of Chabert. Protective? Some parasocial thing where I'm aware she's become associated with a brand and style of media that the general public often has a chuckle about, and they could see Chabert and Hallmark Christmas as synonymous? I will take her participation in the advertising for Purity Facial Cleanser to say she has a pretty level-headed view of the Hallmark brand of film and her place in the cosmos. But her participation in events like the Hallmark Christmas Experience as a sign she is, sure, collecting a pay day, but also showing up to meet people she knows like her work.
And, yes, I realize this post is a defense of her choices - which is a defense she surely doesn't need. She's doing fine, and I wish her well.
As she is not a star you see at the Oscars or Golden Globes, I don't know if one day someone will do an academic study of her work. But maybe when they do, this blog will help out some young scholar.
I've gone out of my way to not know much about her outside of her work - just adding her Instagram in case there was any news. So, hopefully I've successfully stayed off of any lists.
I will keep the Chabert-a-Tron 3000 going. It's possible those missing films will appear one day, and I'll watch them in due course. I am already aware that the Haul Out the Holly team is re-assembled and making Hallmark's first Halloween film in years, if ever. So, we'll be back covering Chabert at that time. And likely do an update for any actual Christmas media she does, as well as whatever she slaps the Chabert label on at Hallmark.
*I will make arguments for Kimberley Sustad and Autumn Reeser
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