Forgotten Holiday Asks Janel Parrish to Talk a Man Back Into Loving Her
Most Hallmark premises are obstacles. This one is a trap.
Kathryn Liu buys antiques for her father’s store and has been with Rob Ashford for nearly a year when he proposes just before Christmas. She is afraid of exactly this, so she leaves without answering him. Driving to his sister’s house afterward, heartbroken, Rob has a car accident.
He loses the past year. Not all of his memory, just that year: their entire relationship, and his once-infectious love of Christmas along with it.
His doctor’s instructions are unconventional, and Kathryn agrees to follow them. She will retrace the romance with him and reintroduce him to the holidays, walking him back through twelve months he cannot reach. Forgotten Holiday premieres Saturday, October 24 at 8/7c.
The catch is the whole movie
Every step Kathryn takes toward giving Rob his memory back is a step toward the night she ran. The better she does this, the closer he gets to remembering that she said nothing and walked out. Hallmark’s own synopsis puts it plainly: bringing Rob back to himself may mean losing him for good.
That is a genuinely uncomfortable engine for a movie on this network, and it is more interesting than the amnesia gimmick suggests. She is not fighting a scheduling conflict or a rival bakery. She is being asked to repair the one thing that will indict her, and the only way out is to become brave enough to claim him before he remembers why he should not want her to.
Janel Parrish has been famous since she was Mona
Parrish played Mona Vanderwaal on Pretty Little Liars, recurring for two seasons and then a series regular for five, then carried the character into Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists. Mona is one of the most durable characters that franchise produced, and for a chunk of the audience it is still the first thing on her resume.
The second thing is Margot Song-Covey in all three Netflix To All the Boys films, plus a return in XO, Kitty. She was born in Hawaii, started performing at six as Little Cosette in Les Miserables, finished third on Dancing with the Stars in 2014 and third again on The Masked Singer in 2023 as Gazelle.
This is her ninth Hallmark film, after Holly & Ivy, Right in Front of Me, Coyote Creek Christmas, Never Been Chris’d, Sugarplummed, Haunted Wedding, Christmas on Duty and Family History Mysteries: Buried Past. She also produces, and currently has an indie feature in development.
Daniel Lissing playing a man who forgot is not nothing
For a large part of the Hallmark audience, Lissing is Mountie Jack Thornton. He played him on When Calls the Heart for five seasons and 44 episodes, and then he left, and the character was killed off, and the reaction to that is still one of the loudest things that has ever happened in this corner of television.
Casting him as a man who has lost a year and has to be told who he loved is the kind of thing that will land differently for viewers who watched that exit. Whether anyone intended the echo is another matter, but it is there.
Outside Hallmark he led ABC’s Last Resort opposite Andre Braugher and Robert Patrick, recurred on The Rookie and S.W.A.T., and played Jesse James on Timeless. He is Australian, came up through Home and Away and Packed to the Rafters, and is a working singer-songwriter who has performed for Australian troops in East Timor. Forgotten Holiday is roughly his seventh Hallmark movie, after titles including A December Bride, Christmas in Love, Santa Tell Me and Single on the 25th.
A When Calls the Heart weekend, six days apart
Lissing’s Jack and Pascale Hutton’s Rosemary shared years of When Calls the Heart. Hutton leads Mr. & Mrs. Christmas on October 18 and Lissing leads this one on October 24. Two Hope Valley leads, two different movies, one week apart, neither one a reunion.
When to watch
Forgotten Holiday premieres Saturday, October 24 at 8/7c on Hallmark Channel, streaming the next day on Hallmark+. Encores run Sunday October 25 at 6/5c and Friday October 30 at 10/9c. Hallmark has not announced a director, a writer, or the actors playing Kathryn’s father and Rob’s sister, and there is no trailer yet, only a photo gallery. See the full Countdown to Christmas schedule for the rest of the season.
The genre usually keeps its stakes gentle, and there is nothing wrong with that. Once in a while, though, one of these movies puts the thing the heroine is most afraid of directly in her path and makes her walk toward it anyway. That is a better movie, and it is the one this looks like.
Sources: Hallmark Channel, TVLine.
