Netflix, in the process of eating Hallmark’s lunch as a nice little dessert after it’s already had everyone else’s, has a couple of new original Christmas movies at the top of the streamer’s most-popular list right now. These are genre plays, aimed straight at Christmas movie fans, tapping into all the expected clichés. One, The Merry Gentlemen, is about a woman saving her parents’ small-town venue by staging an all-male revue, à la Magic Mike. But I’m here to talk about the other one, Hot Frosty, which has reached No. 1 on Netflix and become a little bit of a viral sensation, and has me, frankly, wondering if women are OK.

In Hot Frosty, Lacey Chabert (coming, most recently, from Hallmark, where she made over 30 Christmas movies) plays a young widow, Kathy Barrett, whose husband has died of cancer and who has, in her grief, let her house slowly fall apart. (This is a Christmas movie, so “fall apart” means that the furnace is broken, there’s a leak in the roof, and there’s a hole in a step on the staircase. The outside is still looking pretty, pretty nice.) Kathy, of course, runs the local diner, an establishment that is, of course, located in her small town’s adorable downtown. The diner seems to be doing OK—at least, it’s well attended—but you can see from her interactions with her co-workers that she is a woman on autopilot.

All of this changes when Kathy accepts the gift of a red scarf from a kindly older friend and thrift-store owner, who promises that all she needs to do to meet someone new is to put herself out there. “Good things come to you when you’re out in the cold,” the friend says, with a wink. This line foreshadows what ends up happening next, which is not that Kathy wears the scarf out to a bar and meets a man (that would not be very Christmassy!) but rather that she puts the scarf around the neck of a preposterously hunky snowman someone has made as an entry in the town’s snow sculpture contest. She takes a picture with her iPhone, then goes home to sleep.

In a swirl of icy glitter, the snowman comes alive, and it turns out it’s Dustin Milligan, who played the hot veterinarian on Schitt’s Creek. Milligan spends a lot of time in this movie with his abs out, a fact that (as connoisseurs of this genre would say) makes this film a little “spicier” than some other Christmas movies. In fact, when the snowman is first “born,” he’s wearing only the scarf, which movie-magically stays in front of his crotch as he moves around, learning about his new body. This snowman—he calls himself Jack, after the patch on a set of work clothes he takes from that same thrift store—is born with a deep and abiding allegiance to Kathy, the one who made him come alive.

Part of the thing about Hot Frosty is that you aren’t supposed to think too much about Jack’s biology (it’s just movie magic) or motivation. He’s here for Kathy. There’s a term in romancelandia used to describe very supportive and kind heroes: cinnamon roll. These are guys whose mild nature is their appeal. In movies and TV, think of pure sweeties like Kristoff from Frozen, or Peter Kavinsky from the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series. But this trope can go way too far, and you get simpleminded heroes like Buddy from Elf, who has a 6-year-old’s brain but gets a romance storyline anyway, or my personal least favorite, the brain-bleached baby that True Blood’s antihero vampire Viking Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) turns into after losing his memory due to a witch’s curse. (God, I hated seeing him cinnamon roll–ified like that, needing someone to take him in and care for him, wearing basketball shorts on the couch and watching TV in Sookie’s house. But I digress!)

In Hot Frosty, the “newborn” Jack’s innocence and enthusiasm has no bounds. He’s learning things from the television, like how to fix a roof and how to cook. He’s up on the roof, wearing no shirt, because he can’t get too hot, because (I must remind you!) he is a snowman. He is confused by the reaction of an older lady who sees him on the roof and drives over a curb because he’s so hot. He doesn’t seem to understand what sex is, and there’s a funny sequence in which Jack offers to push the older lady from behind to get her car off the curb. (She agrees enthusiastically, and the humor in the scene comes from Jack’s obliviousness.) He helps middle schoolers decorate for a holiday dance and gets super into it. In her delighted enthusiasm over Jack’s antics, and her protectiveness over him when the sheriff (Craig Robinson) puts him in jail to make a law-and-order statement for his constituents, Kathy reminds you of no one else but a mom who has a very precocious and adorable preschooler.

In the end, Jack somehow (don’t think too hard) becomes a real man, and Kathy and Jack start a new chapter of their lives. Because it’s Kathy herself who finally fixes the furnace, you are supposed to think to yourself, She’s out of her hole. She’ll be OK. It just took taking care of, and falling in love with, a freakishly unworldly blank slate of a man to do the trick. “Is this a Jesus movie?” asked Rachel Handler, tongue in cheek, on Vulture. I’m more inclined to agree with this assessment, from @towerofgrog on X, who points out that a lot of “cheesy, fun media, especially holiday media” for women is “based on the premise ‘What if there was a really attractive man who was not at all socialized like normal men?’ ” Not to get too dire about this kind of fluff, but that’s exactly what Hot Frosty is. Jack would never be appointed to Donald Trump’s Cabinet! He has no history. He is the perfect man.

But Hot Frosty will also please Netflix watchers who like abs and Schitt’s Creek, and Netflix watchers who like Christmas movies, and Netflix watchers who will think it’s really funny that The Office’s Robinson and Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Joe Lo Truglio play the small-town sheriff and deputy, respectively, and Netflix watchers who enjoy Easter eggs, like Chabert’s character glimpsing a brief moment of a Lindsay Lohan Netflix Christmas movie on television, and saying: “That looks like someone I went to high school with.” If Hot Frosty’s popularity is any indicator, more of this will be coming. Maybe next time, the next Kathy will drape her scarf over a pumpkin pie.

This post was originally published on here