Hello friends! So, the number one thing people say when I tell them I write about Lifetime movies is “you mean Hallmark movies?” and I flinch and peevishly explain the difference between Lifetime movies and Hallmark movies. In a Lifetime movie, you can trust no one but yourself and your one designated female best friend or sister, romance is an auxiliary concern, and at the end of it, blood-spattered but triumphant, you sigh, “let’s go home.” In a Hallmark movie, people are generally nice, unless they’re real-estate developers, and even they see the error of their ways by the end of the movie, when the two leads kiss and everyone smiles. But you know what, fine, whatever. I tried to find a Thanksgiving-themed Lifetime movie and, coming up empty save for a “Jim Henson” movie about weird monsters in the woods, which I would have had to pay a dollar to watch, I went for this Hallmark movie about a harvest festival. It’s called HOME FOR HARVEST and I did not like it! (No content warnings for this one. There is barely any content in it. Don’t worry.)
Welcome to The Big City! Which one? It doesn’t matter! The protagonist of our film, Star Travel Writer Katie Porter, swans into a cool office, the kind where people definitely play ping pong and there’s kombucha on tap. She’s wearing sunglasses and thigh-high boots and simply oozing girlboss. Two underlings hover around her to absorb all her lessons from her trip to Cinque Terre (turns out? good food in Italy). They anxiously speculate about where the magazine will send her next, maybe Bora Bora or Goa. Which magazine? It doesn’t matter! Katie’s editor calls her into a meeting, where he informs her that rather than going to the Maldives, she will be going to Greenville, the small town she grew up in, to cover their harvest festival. Katie hates this idea, because she’s a Big City Gal now, she hates small towns and everyone in them. She especially hates everyone in Greenville. Her editor tells her to think of it as a fish out of water story, and Katie replies that fish need water to live. LUNGFISH, Katie, ever heard of them?
Katie leaves the meeting and complains about the assignment to the chief underling, Willa. She hates the festival, where they “give participation ribbons to pigs,” because the pigs are all millennials. She hates Greenville; no friends there, and her only family left is her sister, who she hasn’t really talked to in years. “People in small towns have a lot of time on their hands to hold grudges,” says Katie, like holding a grudge takes any time at all, like you have to put it in your planner. Objections aside, Katie is heading to Greenville. She’s heading………HOME FOR HARVEST. Both “home for harvest” and “home for the harvest” sound equally awkward and bad to me, a native English speaker and professional writer, but I was not consulted.
Star Travel Writer Katie Porter gets off the train in Greenville and immediately calls Willa, who tells her that because it’s a small town having a festival, she couldn’t get her a hotel room but don’t worry! She called Katie’s sister Paige, who still lives in town and is happy to put Katie up on the extremely short notice afforded by the magazine’s failure to plan anything more than two days in advance. That’s print, baby! Willa also called for a rideshare, which turns out to just be an old guy named Frank. He remembers Katie from before she abandoned Greenville and he’s here to dispense twinkly-eyed wisdom one or two times a day. As they drive to Katie’s sister’s house, the radio announces that somebody’s cows got loose and they’re fucking up traffic. Whimsy. Frank drops Katie off at her sister’s house, which is BEAUTIFUL. I’m easily impressed, but there’s a pond! Katie walks around visibly having memories until Paige, dressed in purple scrubs, comes out to tell her if she misses it so much she could visit once in a while. She’s busy, Paige! Busy in the big city!
Inside, we meet Paige’s daughter Maggie and husband Michael. They are both human people and that’s all you need to know about them. Paige asks her sister where the best beaches, food, and honeymooning are (the Seychelles, Italy, and Bora Bora). Katie laments that she’ll never find someone to honeymoon with, which leads to more exposition: she left town go to into journalism and write Important Stories but ended up doing travel writing. Paige stayed home and took care of their mom when she got sick and ended up a nurse. What kind of sick? How long ago was this? Where was their dad? Are they divorced, was he never there, did he die a long time ago? It doesn’t matter! What matters is that Mom was so proud of Katie for making something of herself. Also that there’s a party to kick off the harvest festival tomorrow night, Katie should come, everyone will be there. Katie declines, because she doesn’t want people to know she’s here, and Paige is like, “lol Katie people know.”
In the morning, Katie checks in with Willa, who did all the scheduling and research and everything for Katie’s trip. When did she do this? Didn’t Katie just get this assignment like two days ago? It’s fine. It doesn’t matter. Katie complains about how everyone knows she’s here, including her ex-boyfriend Chad, who’s the reason she left Greenville. I thought she left because she hated it? Whatever, she rushes to her first meeting and straight into the wide handsome chest of some guy, spilling what we’re agreeing to believe is coffee but what is clearly water all over herself. She splutters that this blouse was handmade in Scandinavia and it cost three hundred dollars. “Scandinavia” rings as true as “the big city.” This movie is absolutely terrified of specificity. I’m surprised they let her say “three hundred dollars” and not “a lot.” Maybe after hyperinflation we’ll think three hundred dollars is cheap for a handmade Scandinavian blouse, and I won’t be able to relate to this movie at all. Anyway, Katie yells at this guy, who is unfazed and points out that she ran into him actually, but if she wants him to replace the ““coffee”” he can do that. Katie stalks off to her meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle, a married couple who’ve owned a restaurant in Greenville for over 30 years. While they tell Katie how madly in love they are, and how they’ve seen heartbreak and love and whatever at their restaurant, she pokes at the stain on her $300 Swedish or possibly Norwegian blouse until Mrs. Carlisle gets her some club soda for her damn shirt. The Carlisles say some more garbage about small towns and love and beauty. “Okay,” I say.
Katie goes back to Paige’s house after a long (?) day of interviews and her ex-boyfriend Chad is there! Paige tells her to be civil, adding “he’s your ex-boyfriend, not an ex-convict.” You should be civil to ex-convicts as well. Chad, waiting on the beautiful deck, looking at the beautiful pond, brought flowers. Chad is big and square and he wants to talk. He owes Katie an apology for acting “less than honorable” at the Greenville Herald by which he means that he stole her articles about corruption and got tons of recognition for them. This is the entire explanation we get for why Katie and Chad broke up, and why she left Greenville, the big scar of her life. What kind of corruption? Government, corporate, was somebody at the animal shelter selling puppies to rich women to make coats out of them? Was a local farmer spraying his crops with an untested insecticide that ended up making the local children into supersoldiers? It doesn’t matter! Katie doesn’t reply, and he asks if she’s going to the party tonight. She has a lot of work to do, writing the article about the harvest festival that hasn’t happened yet in the town she has spent 24 hours in, so she doubts it.
Unfortunately, when Katie starts to write her article that night, she only gets as far as the sentence fragment “Coming home back to Greenville” before throwing in the towel on writing (rightly so, what is that even). She and her sister go to the party, which is in a very nice bar of the sort that we don’t have on this particular plane of existence. People are drinking wine and dancing. I do not think I have ever seen someone order wine at a bar that isn’t a wine bar. Do people do this? Why? How? Drink a beer or a rum and coke like a normal person. Chad is at the party, of course, and he’s glad Katie could make it. “Yeah, well, it was this or binge watching ‘Zombie Cats on the Loose,’ so,” she explains. Zombie cats should stay inside, as should all cats, just fyi. As Chad informs her they’ll be judging the Greenville’s Best Dish contest at the festival, a very bad pop punk song starts playing. It’s pop punk so it’s probably actually about leaving a shitty small town, but it’s their song! They have a…dance? to it? That’s just all the dances your uncle does to conceal the fact that he doesn’t know how to dance? Like the macarena, and the thing where you’re pretending to push a cart through the supermarket? After Chad dips Katie and everyone claps for their mating ritual, Chad goes to get Katie a drink. And then wouldn’t you know it, she turns around and bumps into the same guy she’s already bumped into. They banter a bit about who’s really from Greenville here, and then she snaps, “so who are you, some good-looking guy who goes around bumping into women?” You’ve been gone for a long time, Katie, “town bumper” is an elected position now. As Katie stammers at this guy, Chad returns with the drinks, and she just finds the situation too awkward and leaves. That’s my girl.
The next morning, Katie has her daily check-in with Willa and mostly just complains about the guy she bumped into twice, even though she’s supposed to be doing yoga with her sister in the park. Why go to a park! Your yard is a park! Willa tells Katie she’ll be meeting a Noah Jones at 2:00, and then Katie gets off the phone to whine at her sister about how much she misses, okay, you’ll never guess, you’ll never ever guess what breakfast food the big city millennial gal misses, what her favorite thing is. It’s avocado toast! She misses avocado toast. Paige doesn’t think anyone in town makes this fine exotic delicacy of an avocado smushed into some slightly burnt bread, but she’s heard about a new breakfast place so they head over. Katie goes off about how if she bumps into that guy again, she’ll throw a drink in his smug face. “I thought you said he had a pretty face?” replies Paige, and Katie attempts to make a portmanteau of “smug” and “pretty” but it relies on no one in the universe of HOME FOR HARVEST knowing that “smutty” is already a word that means something very different. And now, if you didn’t get the avocado toast quiz right, you have another chance: who runs the new breakfast place? Who is it? Who could it be? Who also happens to be Katie’s 2:00 meeting? It’s the guy Katie keeps bumping into! He heard them talking about his smutty face and invites Katie in for breakfast. “Please feed my sister,” says Paige, who is over it.
Inside Noah’s restaurant, it’s all leather couches and exposed brick and whiskey barrel tables, just like every other restaurant that opened from 2010-2018. Noah tries to tell Katie that he looked her up and read her writing and found it really impressive, but she will not shut up about the fucking avocado toast, there’s “this place” in “the city” that makes the best avocado toast. Shut up!! Stop talking like this! “Oh my gosh have you been to Early Bird? They make the best avocado toast in Toronto,” is what a normal person would say. A normal Canadian person, anyway. Noah agrees to make this lady some avocado toast, even though it’s not on the menu, and he tells her about how he did exactly the opposite thing to her: got his heart broken and fled the big city for a small town. The avocado toast, frankly, looks bad and boring. He only squeezes a little lemon on top and it’s like, soupy avocado puree, not smashed avocado, and there’s no cheese or nuts or seeds on top. Not enough acidity or texture. But Katie loves it and that’s what matters.
Katie goes back to her sister’s house at the end of the day and Paige makes a huge deal out of Noah making her avocado toast, she didn’t know anyone in town knew about avocado toast shut up shut up, and then Katie tucks in her niece Maggie. Maggie lays it on real thick about “if you love us, why do you never visit?” but I’m distracted by the fact that she appears to sleep with a whole-ass table lamp on her bed. Katie says she’s just busy but she’ll spend some time with her tomorrow, and Maggie’s like, “yeah that makes sense” and goes to sleep with her ceramic lamp.
In the morning, Paige and Maggie take Katie to a pumpkin patch. Katie asks her sister to take some photos of her with the gourds, because her editor told her to take some pictures for the article. First of all: yes, travel features usually have pictures. Second of all, to my dawning horror, I think she means that these iPhone pictures taken by Katie’s sister are what will go in the story? Oh no. They leave the pumpkin patch (there’s really only so much you can do in a pumpkin patch) and Katie wanders around town by herself, ending up at Noah’s restaurant. He takes her out to a gelato and juice bar to prove to her they have nice things in Greenville, and she gives him shit for ordering raspberry and pistachio together. Katie just got back from Italy, where they love combining pistachio and fruit, but fine. He tells her more about why he moved to Greenville, how he just didn’t want the hustle and bustle anymore, and you know what, “the things you own……,,,..end up owning you.” Yeah, dude.
After gelato, Katie checks in with Willa, allowing that the last couple days have been “interesting.” “Interesting means a guy! Spill it!” gushes Willa, who probably filmed all of her scenes in the space of about an hour. Katie tells her a little about Noah but then she’s late to give a trophy to a goat. A goatphy. Chad is also at the goat thing, thrilled to see Katie. He tells her how great her writing is, and how much he loves running the Greenville Herald, which has been in his family for years. Chad loves being in charge! He’s never said that out loud to anyone, but he just feels like he can be himself around Katie. She agrees to hang out with him while she’s in town, and asks him who he thinks is going to win Greenville’s Best Dish. Maybe…Noah? Chad scoffs at the mention of Noah’s name. He reviewed Noah’s restaurant (which they, of course, do not ever name, everything in this movie is The City or The Restaurant or The Bar) pretty critically when it opened. Noah didn’t invent “farm to table,” Chad points out, people have been doing that forever, and you should respect the people for whom it’s a way of life. Do they mean Native people? No, just people who lived and died in Greenville. Then they look at a beautiful and majestic goat climbing a wooden structure, and then the scene is over. Who won the trophy! Show me the winning goat!
The next (??) day (???) Frank picks up Katie to take her what I guess is Noah’s farm (?????). When is the harvest festival? Is it now? Is it just the existence of pumpkin patches or do things happen? The farm is very pretty and Noah is wearing a very nice sweater, and he announces that he might start making pumpkin spice lattes at his restaurant, a very new and innovative thing to import from the big city. He drops a bombshell about how most pumpkin spice lattes don’t even have pumpkin in them which, yeah, it’s “pumpkin spice,” aka “the spices that accompany pumpkin,” why would I want a gourd in my coffee? I wouldn’t. There’s a montage of Noah and Katie picking out a perfect pumpkin, and then they go back to Noah’s restaurant so he can try out his pumpkin spice latte recipe. It’s great! Katie loves drinking that gourd juice. Noah asks her if Chad is really the reason she left Greenville, and she says that the whole situation with Chad was part of it, but she also just wanted to leave. She feels bad for leaving Paige to take care of their mom, but hey, what can you do. Also there’s no one in the restaurant, is it literally only open for breakfast? Is that sustainable? Because there’s no one there, Noah makes dinner for Katie and they get up and slow dance to music that suddenly started playing. It sounds like “Unchained Melody” so I get it. Chad walks by and sees them embracing and is like, “huh.”
So apparently all Katie did yesterday was hang out with Noah, because it’s morning again. Also, Paige has horses? Has had horses the whole time? It makes sense but horses are large and we should have seen them before now. Katie and Paige gaze at the horses while talking about Chad and Noah, and then Katie goes to hang out with Chad. They walk through a field laughing about the time Chad got his truck stuck in the mud and some other teenage garbage nobody cares about. Katie says that there’s more to Greenville than she was expecting: there’s a lot of good food, and also no one spat on her on sight, so that’s nice. Plus she’s kind of jealous of what Paige has, maybe if the right guy came along things would change for Katie. Chad says the best thing about Greenville is that he sees memories of Katie everywhere he goes. He never stopped loving her, and he tries to kiss her and it does NOT go over. But she smiled when she said the thing about the right g—oh nooooo she meant Noahhhhh how embarrassingggg. Katie, reasonably, leaves.
Katie, wasting no time, is in a gazebo with Noah. When is the FESTIVAL. Please do some festival things! Was the goat thing part of the festival? Was Noah making dinner for Katie part of the festival? Is the child’s bed lamp part of the festival? Is Noah wearing another great sweater part of the festival? Katie and Noah talk about avocado toast again, because it has been one of the highlights of her trip. That, and meeting Noah, and reconnecting with Paige. Forming a relationship with her sister, eating toast, these are the things that matter to Katie. Katie tells Noah that when she’s with him, she feels like she’s home, and like she can be honest about her true feelings. “Which are?” asks Noah, but then Paige calls Katie, gotta go, byeeee. What does Paige need? Don’t know! Never explained. It’s fine. It doesn’t matter!
Noah is cleaning up his restaurant at the end of the night, or maybe after breakfast service, time doesn’t matter either, when Chad saunters in. Noah asks if he’s there to write another biased, unfair article about his restaurant. No, Chad is simply there to swing his dick around and lay claim to Katie, who by the way he was just on a date with, who by the way says she still hates Greenville, same old garbage town with the same old garbage chefs named Noah. “Mmhm yes sure,” says Noah, but Chad hands him an early edition of the Greenville Herald. He can read about Katie and Chad’s date in this article where she badmouths him and the whole town right in the paper! Katie can’t wait to get back to the big city, where no one cares about local ingredients! Well at least someone is getting some writing done.
Katie has her daily dose of Willa the next morning, and Willa informs her it’s the last day of the harvest festival. What?? Was Katie supposed to be covering the harvest festival? Maybe she did it offscreen, like how Jack Bauer went to the bathroom? But if she was going to the harvest festival she would presumably know…the dates of the harvest festival and wouldn’t need Willa to tell her? Whatever. Fine. The cooking contest Katie and Chad are judging is tonight, because it’s the last night of the harvest festival. I wish the harvest festival had a name other than “the harvest festival.” The one in my small hometown was “Saufen und Spiel” but that’s a name of a thing and we can’t allow that in HOME FOR HARVEST. We’re lucky they allowed Chad and Paige and Noah to have names instead of just being Ex-Boyfriend and Sister and New Guy, Berenstain Bear style.
Anyway, on this last day of the harvest festival, Katie visits Noah at his restaurant, but he’s being a real dick because he believed the article Chad wrote in his own newspaper, about his ex-girlfriend, who is showing interest in another man. I admit that I’m not totally clear on Chad’s best case scenario for himself: he will drive Katie out of Noah’s arms, sure, but then, ??? She knows Chad wrote the article that made her look like a huge bitch. ANYWAY, after Noah shows Katie the article, which he 100% believes to be true because he’s an infant, she stomps down to the Carlisles’ restaurant, where Chad is hanging out. She picks a croissant off some guy’s plate and hucks it across the dining room at Chad, who’s like “oh you didn’t like the quotes I made up and attributed to you? Well, we all know you hate Greenville.” The guy whose croissant Katie hucked nods like, “yes, we know this. I am in this scene because of my croissant.” Katie asks Chad if he wants a quote, and then the movie does the thing where someone says a cuss word very loud and we’re not allowed to hear it with our virgin ears.
Katie goes home to Paige, who’s reading the article too, and Katie yells that she can’t WAIT to get OUT of here and go BACK to the BIG CITY and NEVER come BACK to GREENVILLE. Paige is like, “hm, weird, you keep saying ‘the big city’ but you never say which one? Also, of course you want to leave, that’s the thing you do, just like when Mom got sick and I needed you.” Katie admits she didn’t even want to come on this assignment, and rightly so, she has done a terrible job. I do not think she went to the harvest festival once, except maybe the goat thing, and now she’s leaving before she even judges Greenville’s Best Dish. Frank comes to pick Katie up (wouldn’t he have just dropped her off at her sister’s? how did she get home from Noah’s? how did she get to Noah’s? it doesn’t matter!) and as he’s loading her luggage into the truck, he tells her about the time he ate so much pumpkin pie at the harvest festival that he had to lie down in the truck bed, and no one could find him for hours. Frank! Incredible. What a life he must lead. He also says “it’s a shame you’re leaving before the festival,” and does that mean the festival is ONLY tonight? This Best Dish competition is the whole festival? And Katie is supposed to write a whole feature for a glossy magazine about it? It doesn’t matter! Frank drops Katie off at a vegan restaurant whose owners glare at Katie while telling her that their mac and cheez will win Best Dish, finally dethroning Greenville Grill’s hamburger, and also fuck you Katie you small-town-leaving monster no you cannot try the vegan mac and cheez.
At the festival, at the festival, which is finally happening in the last eight minutes of the movie, Frank and Katie have one last little chat. Katie’s sad that she’s fleeing Greenville for exactly the same reason she fled it before: Chad fucked up and left her a mess. Frank gets that nice old man twinkle going in his eye and tells her that In Life, Some Decisions Are Being Pushed Away From Something, And Some Are Being Pulled In By Something. Sure. Scrolling through photos of Noah on her phone, Katie decides to go with a “pull,” she will stay to judge the Best Dish contest after all, and I decide to make this in thirty seconds with a free stock photo:
The Best Dish contest is being held in a dimly lit barn reminiscent of the one where they kept the oracle’s books in Midsommar. Katie finds Paige in the crowd and promises that she’ll come home more often, for Christmas and holidays and good times and bad, until she gets sick of train rides or is again nebulously wronged by some thick-necked newspaperman. They hug and Paige tells Katie to go get “Mr. Smutty,” ughhhhhh, god, “oh, ‘smutty’ doesn’t work!” says Katie. No SHIT, Katie. “Goatphy” worked better, and that sucked! The competitors for Greenville’s Best Dish are called to the stage, and it’s just Noah, the Carlisles, and the mean vegans, until Katie grabs the mic and asks to say a few words. The emcee tells her no, we’ve heard enough from Katie Porter, local journalism is alive and well in Greenville and trust in the media has never been higher. Chad himself steps up to tell her to shut her damn big city mouth, but Katie will not be silenced. She tells the festival that Chad is a liar, she actually loves this town and she’s so glad she came back and was welcomed with open arms (until one of their own said a bad thing about her and the arms shut, but okay). She loves Greenville and she loves Noah, who she met four days ago, and she’s sorry they had to endure the psychic wound of reading an unflattering article about her! Noah is like, oh, okay, sure, and they kiss, and then the winner of Greenville’s Best Dish is announced. It’s the Carlisles’ caramel apple crunch! Congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle. And what’s next for Katie? “The paper wants me to go to Thailand,” she says, “but maybe I’ll stick around here.” The??? paper????? Katie you work for a magazine. We’ve been saying “magazine” the whole time. Katie. Katie pull it together. And that’s the movie! Good luck to Katie and Noah, who have just met, and who will surely never have any conflicts about how much time to spend in the city and how much in Greenville, or Katie’s job, or Noah’s job, or Katie’s tendency to dip out when things get hard, or the way Katie declared her love for him in front of the whole town she grew up in and then deserted, before they had even kissed. They’re gonna be fine! And so are you. I’ll see what I can do for Christmas next time!
content warning: this is not a place of content
"greenville 25" is actually the population, and chad's newspaper is just him airing his snotty little grievances to 24 people
they all hate him but he is funding the potemkin village that lures in Big City Magazine Writers for their nefarious ends
"jct. 401 27" is a typo