Hallmark Holiday Watch: Holiday Touchdown - a Bills Love Story (2025)

Watched:  11/25/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Dustin Rikert

So, for reasons beyond my understanding, the NFL has entered into an alliance with Hallmark to produce movies about super-fans of their teams falling in love at Christmas.  

In no way will this get repetitive after 32 movies.

Despite some real star-power (for Hallmark) the first movie was a complete mess.  And I expected more-of-same.

Holiday Touchdown: a Bills Love Story (2025) actually solved some of the issues of the first movie but then blew my mind by trying to create a sort of MCU of NFL-themed movies by showing the characters from the first movie in this one.  And the magical Santa is in this one mucking with people's lives.

The last movie had some star power with Diedrich Bader, Richard Riehle, Ed Begley Jr., Christine Ebersole, et al.  What it didn't really have was much actual representation by the Chiefs players.  

This one had Joey Pantoliano playing a version of himself as a wacky uncle.  Our stars are Woman (Holland Roden) and Man (Matthew Daddario, who I didn't know, but people keep fan-casting his sister as Wonder Woman, and... fair).  They're childhood friends and neighbors, and the running gag is everyone knows he's pining for Woman.

There's lot of Bills-specific humor which I vaguely get, and lots of regional-specific stuff, which did not lose me, but sure felt like them making sure we knew they were in Buffalo and not doing the usual "we filmed in Vancouver, but please believe this is Arizona" thing Hallmark will do.

The pair find out Joey Pants has been receiving gifts every year from an anonymous source, going back to when he was drafted and this same anonymous person also sent his family groceries and money.  The movie is them solving the mystery.  

Along the way, they fall in love, blah blah blah...  but there's also LOTS of Bills players and coaches and owners and whatnot.  And the main character is a project manager on the new stadium, so there's lots of discussion about that.  But none about how expensive tickets are supposed to be in the new stadium.

I dunno, like a lot of the new Hallmark movies, it's actually kind of funny.  Not gut-bustingly, but I had a chuckle or two.  It feels more like a sitcom than a Hallmark movie.  And that is not a complaint.  Anyway, they fixed a lot that didn't work in last year's offering.