Winter Wonderlanes Sets a Hallmark Christmas Movie in a Bowling Alley
The bakery has been done. The tree farm has been done. The inn, the toy shop, the hot chocolate stand and the family orchard have all been done, several times each, often well. Winter Wonderlanes goes bowling.
It premieres Friday, October 23 at 8/7c, and the alley is called Wonderlanes, which is where the title’s pun comes from and also, it turns out, where most of the movie’s heart is.
Audrey comes home for Thanksgiving and gets bad news
Audrey Bell has built a career as a globe-trotting pop-up restaurateur, which is a polite way of saying she has spent years being excellent at leaving. She comes back for Thanksgiving and learns that her late grandfather’s bowling alley is about to be sold.
Her plan is the Winter Wonderlanes youth tournament, the thing the place used to be known for. Reviving it means getting the town’s attention, and getting the town’s attention means the local news, and the local news sends Jason Miller, who happens to be the boyfriend she had in high school.
What the premise buys, and what a bakery would not, is a reason for a lot of people to be in one room making noise. Bowling alleys are loud and a little shabby and full of other people’s families. It is a harder setting to make pretty and a much easier one to make feel real.
The question underneath the tournament is whether Audrey is saving the alley so she can leave it in good hands or because she has finally found a reason to stop moving.
Ashley Newbrough has been at this since Degrassi
Newbrough came up through Canadian teen television, including Radio Free Roscoe and Degrassi: The Next Generation, before landing Sage Baker on The CW’s Privileged, opposite Lucy Hale and Joanna Garcia Swisher. She later recurred on ABC’s Mistresses as Kyra.
On the Hallmark side she has eight films behind her, which makes Winter Wonderlanes her ninth: Love Under the Stars, Small Town Christmas, Christmas for Keeps, Saving Christmas Spirit, Blue Moon Ball, Flowers and Honey, The Valentine Competition and Hearts Around the Table: Jenna’s First Love. Four of those landed in 2021 alone, which is a pace.
Franco Lo Presti played professional soccer in Italy
This is the best backstory in the movie and it is not in the movie.
Lo Presti grew up in Scarborough, Ontario, and earned a Division I soccer scholarship to the University of Rhode Island, where he stumbled into a theatre class. He went on to play professionally in Italy’s Serie D and trialed with Toronto FC. A hip injury ended the athletic career. He did not start acting until he was 26, and he has described finding it as finding his peace and purpose.
Since then he has turned up on Workin’ Moms, Hudson & Rex and Astrid and Lilly Save the World, and most recently in the series Heated Rivalry. He writes poetry and music and plays guitar. Casting a former professional athlete as the guy covering a youth sports tournament is either very deliberate or a very good accident.
One credit worth attributing carefully
Girls Gone Hallmark reported back in April that Winter Wonderlanes is directed by Max McGuire, a Hallmark veteran. Worth noting that the report predates the film’s official announcement, and Hallmark has not published crew credits for it, so that one belongs to Girls Gone Hallmark rather than the network.
That April item does tell you something useful, though: the movie was in the can months before the September schedule drop. Hallmark had this one finished and waiting.
When to watch
Winter Wonderlanes premieres Friday, October 23 at 8/7c on Hallmark Channel, with an encore Saturday October 24 at 6/5c, streaming next day on Hallmark+. It opens the second full weekend of the 17th Countdown to Christmas, ahead of Forgotten Holiday on Saturday and What If Christmas on Sunday. The complete schedule is here.
Hallmark has spent a few seasons now quietly widening what a small town looks like on this network. A bowling alley with worn lanes and a youth league and a grandfather’s name somewhere on the wall is a better version of the same idea the tree farm was always reaching for.
Sources: Hallmark Channel, Girls Gone Hallmark, TVLine.
