‘Family Guy’ Sends up Holiday Movies (and Actual Holiday Movies), Romance off the Ice, Florida Fables

Family Guy

Meet Lois, a “big city Miss” (as Lainey Wilson warbles) who’s too busy climbing the corporate ladder of Big Pie headquarters in Cityopolis to worry about love. “When are you gonna slow down?” wonders a co-worker. “Find a man or a dog, those being the only options since this is a Hallmark movie.” And so Family Guy sends up every conceivable cliché of the TV holiday flick in a riotous, and occasionally cruel, parody of the ubiquitous genre. Tasked by her mean boss to steal an award-winning pie recipe from Aunt Maude’s, a “podunk pie shop in the middle of nowhere” — Townsville, pop. 241 (“mostly cousins who hooked up”), to be exact — Lois encounters Peter, a single-dad mechanic who also owns Aunt Maude’s. Cue the barbed cutesy montages, with gags about product placement, scenes with minorities that can be trimmed in certain states, a cameo from Andie McDowell (not the real one), and the twist when Peter discovers Lois’s true purpose: “So this whole time our love was fake — like Covid?”

The Snow Must Go On

The Yule Log: The Christmas movie industry is no laughing matter — at least to its legion of fans. Hallmark begins three consecutive nights of double features with The Snow Must Go On (6/5c), starring Broadway veteran Corey Cott (Law & Order: SVU) as a musical-theater star whose path to a comeback may include directing a high-school Christmas show in an upstate New York town at the bequest of a guidance counselor (Heather Hemmens), followed by The More the Merrier (8/7c), starring Rachel Boston and Brendan Penny as an ER doctor and cardiologist called into duty to help deliver several Christmas Eve babies. Mario Lopez stars in Great American Family’s The Christmas Spark (8/7c) as a middle-aged lawyer who chucks his career to become a firefighter.

Aww together now for A Paw Patrol Christmas (8/7c, CBS), a new animated family special featuring original and classic holiday tunes in the story of Rubble, a construction-savvy pup who springs into action with the PAW Patrol when Santa gets a cold and can’t deliver his presents, prompting Mayor Humdinger to go to the North Pole to hog all the gifts.

Heated Rivalry

Based on the Game Changers book series by Rachel Reid, a secret romance blossoms in a sports drama from Canada. Created by Letterkenny‘s Jacob Tierney, the six-part series follows hockey stars Shane (Hudson Williams) and the Russian Ilya (Connor Storrie) over eight years, from being recruited as rookies onto rival teams through their pro career, always hiding from the public their passionate attraction to each other. “This is such a bad idea,” Shane tells Ilya during one of their clandestine meetings. Is there room in the world of competitive sports for a love like theirs? Launches with two episodes.

It’s Florida, Man

Some familiar faces (one uncredited) spin stranger-than-fiction tales of life in the Sunshine State, bolstered by commentary from actual Floridians in a second season of the quirky comedy anthology. In the opener, “Speedy,” a low-level career criminal plans an audacious caper that involves stealing an entire floating casino. What could go wrong? Just about everything. As a retired former chief of police notes, there were “very few brain cells working at the same time.”

Formula E: Driver

A second season of the immersive sports docuseries goes on and off the track with drivers in the growing motorsport of the all-electric Formula E, following them through their 11th campaign in 2024-25. Among the dramatic storylines: the rivalry of former teammates turned competitors Pascal Wehrlein of the Porsche team and António Félix de Costa (now with Jaguar).

INSIDE FRIDAY TV:

• Black (& White) Friday (starts at 8 am/7c, MeTV Toons): Take a break from Black Friday to enjoy nearly 100 vintage black-and-white animated shorts, featuring such cartoon icons as Betty Boop, Popeye, Daffy Duck, and P-P-Porky Pig.
• Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks (8/7c, Oxygen): The wife of notorious Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán tells her story in a two-hour documentary special that depicts their relationship from when the teenage beauty queen met the infamous leader of the Sinaloa Cartel when she was just 17.
• Broadway’s Leading Ladies (PBS, check local listings): Available to PBS stations and streaming on PBS Passport, a concert filmed at New York’s Town Hall in March features showstoppers delivered by more than a dozen female stage stars, including Tony winners Jennifer Holliday, LaChanze, Lindsay Mendez, and Jessie Mueller.

 ON THE STREAM:

• Black Friday Football (3 pm/ET, Prime Video): The Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles take on the Chicago Bears in the streamer’s third annual Black Friday game.
• Left-Handed Girl (streaming on Netflix): Anora Oscar winner Sean Baker is among the producers of this poignant Taiwanese film from director Shih-Ching Tsou about a struggling single mother who uproots her two daughters from the countryside to Taipei to open a noodle stand.
• The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo (streaming on Netflix): An intriguing documentary questions and seeks the true identity of the photographer who shot one of the most famous war photos of all time, of children fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War.
• The Baltimorons (streaming on Sundance Now): Director Jay Duplass‘ bittersweet comedy makes its streaming debut, starring co-writer Michael Strassner as a newly sober Baltimorean who spends an unorthodox Christmas Eve with the emergency dentist (Liz Larsen) who treats him after he cracks a tooth.