About:
- Genres:
- Holiday
- Romantic Comedy
Fix: Holiday Romances, You Know You’re Destined For Royalty, Hidden Identities
Platforms: Netflix
Netflix Summary:
Royalty. Romance. And a really handsome prince. He’s her most important assignment to date.
FYA Summary:
Amber gets the journalistic break of a lifetime when she is chosen to cover the potential coronation or abdication of the Crown Prince of Aldovia. Labeled a womanizing, selfish playboy by the press, Prince Richard is just as likely to skip out to Cabo as he is to attend a royal function. When Amber’s tenacity gets her mistaken for Princess Emily’s tutor, she runs with it to get the inside scoop. But once she knows the real Prince Richard, will she be able to write that royal tell-all?
Familiar Faces:
Rose McIver as Amber
It’s Liv from iZombie pretending to be a regular human! I mean… Is it weird that it’s hard to look at Rose without her white-blonde wig? She a step above Hallmark-actresses here, though it’s tough for any one person to really make a cheesy Christmas romance script shine.
Ben Lamb as Prince Richard
Netflix tells me Ben has been in Divergent (as Edward? I have literally no idea who that is), The White Queen, and Now You See Me 2. His involvement in this movie makes a lot more sense to me than Rose’s, but what can I say–everyone is shilling for Netflix these days! Ben is perfect as a white-bread Prince of a fake European country a la Genovia.
Alice Krige as Queen Helena
Hey-o, she was on Dinotopia! Does anyone remember that miniseries? Aside from that stunning piece of television mastery, Alice has enjoyed a long career, including roles like The Borg Queen in Star Trek and a stint on Deadwood.
Honor Kneafsey as Princess Emily
Honor has been in quite a few things for being so young, but it looks like her most popular would be a guest appearance on two BBC Sherlock episodes. She starts off as the typical bratty princess in need of a little bit of TLC and turns into a fairly sweet character.
Emma Louise Saunders as Lady Sophia
Emma Louise has one of those faces where you know you’ve seen her before, but this seems to be her biggest role to date. Her character is a very stereotypical rich-witch with an ambitious streak and she plays it…well?
Theo Devaney as Simon
Theo seems to have done some video game voice work and some one-off roles on shows like Supernatural and Psych. His Simon is both smarmy and whiny; a perfect combo that you can easily hate and subsequently revel in his comeuppance.
Couch-Sharing Capability: Like-Minded Individuals
Your spouse of the male persuasion is probably going to shudder at the thought of sitting on the couch with you for 92 minutes to get through this movie. That’s fine; they don’t need to be there. Invite a friend over, or maybe your mom! They’ll enjoy it with you without snarky commentary (unless you enjoy that kind of thing).
Recommended Level of Inebriation: Fancy Poinsettias
This movie demands the bubbly. If you haven’t had a Poinsettia, it’s champagne and cranberry juice—SO GOOD. The cranberry makes it festive and the champagne goes with the fancy chandeliers.
Use of Your Streaming Subscription: Alternative To Hallmark
You know this movie is Netflix putting out their feelers to see how lucrative it would be to start impinging on the H word’s market share of holiday romances. Sure, this was probably a discounted script that Hallmark passed on a while back, but I’m hopeful that Netflix can tap into more original and diverse stories in the future. Netflix is clearly paying close attention to their viewership numbers on this, as evidenced by this amusing tweet.
