What to watch this holiday season: ‘Dear Santa,’ musical variety shows and a cute little owl

Here in these United States of Cognitive Dissonance, Christmas — against which there is nor has there ever been a war — is coming. If anything, it is attacking you, its troops already arrayed in drugstore aisles, advancing through catalog pages, singing its songs through supermarket speakers, with the pine and fir trees that will fill vacant and parking lots across the country close behind.

In this campaign, there is no weapon more powerful than television, which has earmarked the Thanksgiving to New Year’s window for holiday-themed programming. Even now, original — meaning freshly made, not conceptually new — Christmas rom-coms are clambering out of the trenches, not only on Hallmark and Lifetime, which owned the breed for a while, but on Netflix and Hulu and everywhere else seeking to grab a slice of that cinnamon-scented, sentimental pie. There are more than 100 new ones this year, with no more than 10 plots between them, joining the many hundreds, maybe thousands, that came before — and keep coming back.

Each year, starting around Thanksgiving, culture vultures get to unwrap an early present: a raft of films, TV shows, concerts and more that fill the calendar through the end of the season. And this week, The Times is happy to be your guide to some of the most noteworthy offerings, from Oscar contenders and crowd-pleasers to holiday specials you and the family can curl up with. Read on!

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With seasonal specials and special episodes of Your Favorite Shows and seemingly every halfway decent big-screen holiday movie of the last 30 years hauled out to run in a loop on cable TV, the only defense to this onslaught is surrender. Christmas is coming to television, and you might as well enjoy it. So please accept this partial guide, with the caveat that most of these shows have not been available to preview.

Of holiday films that aren’t romantic comedies, most promising is “Dear Santa” (Paramount+, Nov. 25), in which a child’s misaddressed letter to Santa gets him a visit from Satan (Jack Black) instead. As the trailer suggests it’s … a Jack Black movie, and should not be confused with another “Dear Santa” (ABC-owned stations, Sunday; streaming on Hulu Nov. 29) — a returning, heartwarming docuseries from the United States Postal Service, wherein human “elves” fulfill the Christmas requests of deserving children. The disturbingly titled Australian import “Nugget Is Dead? A Christmas Story” (CBS, Dec. 14 and streaming now on Paramount+) finds budding dermatologist Steph (Vic Zerbst) canceling Christmas with her boyfriend’s dull, snobby family and back with her lively, noisy, exasperating clan when their dog takes sick. After her mother announces that Steph is bisexual and the vet is a lesbian, no further clues need be planted. (It is a sort of rom-com in the end, but not at all in the middle.)

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1. Jack Black, left, and Robert Timothy Smith star in “Dear Santa,” streaming on Paramount+. (Jessica Miglio) 2. Vic Zerbst and Gia Carides in “Nugget is Dead: A Christmas Story,” airing on CBS and streaming on Paramount+. (Lisa Tomasetti for Easy Tiger)

Variety, which once ruled the airwaves, survives today largely at Christmastime, where its mainstream, something-for-almost-everyone ethos suits the season. The streamers have dipped their toes into that deep pond, but the form still belongs to broadcast network television, where it has been perfected over decades.

NBC has produced a trio of new such specials. For middle-aged urban sophisticates, there’s “Jimmy Fallon’s Holiday Seasoning Spectacular” (Dec. 4, streaming the next day on Peacock) playing off of the “Tonight Show” host’s new album of comic holiday duets. Reportedly, it finds Fallon going door to door in a New York apartment building, discovering a guest star behind each, like Dean Martin used to. (Martin holiday specials, by the way, still live on YouTube, where they are worth seeking out.) Featured performers include Dolly Parton, Jonas Brothers, Justin Timberlake, Cara Delevingne, LL Cool J, J.B. Smoove, Meghan Trainor, “Weird Al” Yankovic, the Rockettes and, of course, the Roots.

Not forgetting the Motor City, Smokey Robinson and Halle Bailey host “A Motown Christmas” (Dec. 11, next day on Peacock), with Hitsville stalwarts Robinson, Gladys Knight, Martha Reeves and the Temptations mixing with young and young-ish folks, including Jamie Foxx, BeBe Winans, Jordin Sparks, Andra Day, October London and Jojo. As a person neither young nor young-ish — except, of course, in spirit — I did have to look up a couple of them. Motown released some of the best Christmas music back in the day, so prospects are good.

I also had to research Little Big Town, whose illustrious 25-year career had somehow escaped my notice; based on their videos, they strike me as a country music ABBA if Bj?rn and Benny Andersson sang harmony, which is, to be sure, a compliment. “Little Big Town’s Christmas at the Opry” (Dec. 16, streaming on Peacock the next day) also ties in to a Christmas album, called “The Christmas Album.” Guests include Sheryl Crow, gospel star Kirk Franklin, actor-lately-turned-singer Kate Hudson, South African masked country singer Orville Peck and Josh Groban, who has his own special coming (more on that below).

CBS offers “An Evening With Dua Lipa” (Dec. 15, streaming on Paramount+), presenting the pop star in concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall, backed by a 53-piece orchestra, interspersed with segments in which she “shares her thoughts and emotions in real time, giving audiences a glimpse into the woman behind the superstar.” Elton John has been advertised as appearing in “a surprise performance,” so act surprised. “Nate Bargatze’s Nashville Christmas” (Dec. 19, streaming on Paramount+), an oleo of stand-up, sketches and music, caps a big year for the lovable Tennessee comedian; producer Lorne Michaels and writers Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell bring the “SNL” magic, building on their success with Bargatze’s “Washington’s Dream” sketch. “Josh Groban & Friends Go Home for the Holidays” (Dec. 20, streaming on Paramount+) will, in addition to the musical fun (James Bay, Jennifer Hudson, Tori Kelly, the War and Treaty), pay tribute to the foster care system and feature an on-air adoption. (One would like to be cynical about this but cannot.)

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1. Smokey Robinson and Halle Bailey host “A Motown Christmas.” (Carell Augustus/NBC) 2. “An Evening with Dua Lipa” was filmed in London at Royal Albert Hall and features a special duet with Elton John. (Elizabeth Miranda) 3. A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter. Sabrina Carpenter hosts “A Nonsense Christmas, which features an appearance with country music star Shania Twain. (Parrish Lewis/Netflix)

To feed its holiday kitty, ABC has, as is traditional, turned to its corporate parent, with the resulting specials “The Wonderful World of Disney: Holiday Spectacular” (Dec. 1), a musical hour, and “Disney Parks Magical Christmas Day Parade” (Dec. 25, at 5 a.m. PT, so set your clocks), from Disneyland and Disney World. The human participants in this celebration of theme parks and IP have not as of this writing been revealed, but as sure as nobody knows why Goofy can speak but Pluto can’t, Mickey and Minnie are bound to appear.

Not featuring characters created, co-opted or copyrighted by Disney is ABC’s annual “CMA Country Christmas” (Dec. 3, streaming the next day on Hulu and Disney+), hosted by Carly Pearce, with guests including Maren Morris, Old Dominion, the busy duo the War and Treaty, and my personal alt-bluegrass idol, Molly Tuttle.

Not on broadcast television, and thus trending younger, spikier and left of the middle of the road, is “A Nonsense Christmas With Sabrina Carpenter” (Netflix, Dec. 6), with the singer-actor serving a smorgasbord of music and comedy. Guests include Chappell Roan, Quinta Brunson, Shania Twain, Kali Uchis, Cara Delevingne, Kyle Mooney, Nico Hiraga, Megan Stalter, Sean Astin, Owen Thiele, Tyla and Jillian Bell. I had to look up most of those names too.

Nothing says Christmas quite like stop-motion animation. (NBC will be showing the special that started it all, the indelible, inevitable Rankin-Bass “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” 60 years old this year, on Dec. 6 and 12.) Directed by David Lowery (“Peter Pan & Wendy”) and produced by Alfonso Cuarón, the gorgeous, semi-realistic, puppet-animated “An Almost Christmas Story” (now streaming on Disney+) takes off from the real-life 2020 rescue of a little owl from the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. (The lighting of the tree will be broadcast by 30 Rock tenant NBC — simulcast on Peacock — Dec. 4, with Kelly Clarkson hosting the usual suspects in a musical extravaganza, “Christmas in Rockefeller Center.”)

Brilliantly designed and lit, foregrounding a novel use of materials, “An Almost Christmas Story” is at once magical and life-sized, thoughtful, suspenseful, funny and here and there terrifying (like the best children’s literature). The actual event was heart-melting enough; the film, which is determined not to let you off dry-eyed, adds a lost little girl named Luna (Estella Madrigal), who becomes the traveling companion of young owl Moon (Cary Christopher), hijacked to the city when the tree he’s hiding in is chopped down to decorate Rockefeller Plaza. Jim Gaffigan plays Moon’s father, with Alex Ross Perry as a territorial dog (“This is my place … I’ve peed all over it”) and Natasha Lyonne as the leader of a gang of thuggish pigeons. John C. Reilly narrates in the person of a street singer. Don’t pass this by.

Disney+’s “An Almost Christmas Story” centers on a little owl named Moon who befriends a girl named Luna.

(Disney)

Those among us who find more magic in a single picture-book illustration than 100 hours of CGI animation, will find much to love in the very 2-D “The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland” (now streaming on Hulu). Adapting Carys Bexington‘s 2019 book and taking cues from Kate Hindley’s drawings, it concerns a lost letter to Santa (Gerard Butler) that sends him into Wonderland, where the bitter, tyrannical Queen of Hearts (Emilia Clarke) is not at all one with the Christmas spirit. Carroll characters abound, the dialogue is all in rhyming couplets. It has the dryness of British humor and the slapstick energy of a Mack Sennett two-reeler and goes places only cartoons can. The reindeer are hilarious.

St. Nick appears again in the animated “That Christmas” (Netflix,Dec. 4), with “Love Actually” screenwriter Richard Curtis co-adapting his own 2020 picture book, and a ridiculously great voice cast that includes Brian Cox, Fiona Shaw, Bill Nighy, Jodie Whittaker, Lolly Adefope, Katherine Parkinson and Rhys Darby — like, all my favorite people. It’s unavailable for review as of this writing, but the trailer shows parents stuck abroad in a snowstorm, kids taking care of themselves (or not) at home, a flock of turkeys and Santa in some sort of crisis. In CGI, sadly, but otherwise looking good.

Before we go, I can’t help but recommend again, and will as long as I’m asked to do these holiday roundups, the 1965 revisionist fairy-tale TV musical “The Dangerous Christmas of Little Red Riding Hood” (YouTube), with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill, who had written “Funny Girl” a couple years before. The unlikely combination of a 19-year-old Liza Minnelli as Red, Cyril “Captain Hook” Ritchard as the Wolf and the Animals, of “House of the Rising Sun” fame, as his vulpine crew, is a Christmas miracle I can get behind. Could such a thing happen in our fractured, culturally insular day and age? Don’t answer that.

One more thing: Christmas Day is the 100th birthday of Rod Serling, and to honor him, check out the lovely “The Night of the Meek” (Paramount+), a 1960 “Twilight Zone” episode written by Serling himself. Art Carney plays an otherwise unemployed alcoholic department store Santa, saddened by a world where “the only thing that comes down the chimney is more poverty.” For one Christmas, he says, “I’d like to see the meek inherit the Earth.” If you know “The Twilight Zone,” you can guess where it’s going, but it’s moving even so and as true as anything you’ll see to the spirit of the season.

And to all a good night.