Tonight: let’s talk about the hilariously bad Hallmark-produced, NBC-aired 2004 version of A Christmas Carol, starring Kelsey Grammer and whoever else was on the network payroll or owed them a favour that year, I guess?
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This one is based on a 1994 Alan Menken-scored stage musical, and the songs aren’t…good? 💦 Like, Scrooge (1970) (oh, I’ll get to that one) is an Oliver!-like hash with a gigantic ensemble cast, but the songs are at least memorable in themselves. This one's a little bit too Adult Contemporary, too often.
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This sure is the most spotlessly clean, fluorescently lit Victorian London I’ve ever seen, and the most that looks like it was primarily filmed inside a community centre. There’s completely wrong-looking parquet floor everywhere, I presume because a lot of these scenes are in a single redressed location?
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Hey, remember in Scrooged, where Bill Murray’s fictional TV network is putting on the most bafflingly tacky adaptation of A Christmas Carol the movie can come up with? That’s what the main outdoor set looks like here.
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Kelsey Grammer is playing Scrooge like Frasier performing in a self-consciously amateurish community theatre production (“Par-li-yament,” he spouts), but if that’s what was happening, it’d be funny because we know that part of the basic premise there is that Frasier is a self-important tool and the joke always ultimately is on him? Whereas…this is just Kelsey Grammer, Republican, doing it.
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Similarly, Jane Krakowski is just unavoidably coming off as Jenna Maroney hamming it up by way of HER SEXUALITY~ and is entirely too horny for the room, both as a grubby gamine chimney sweep and Christmas Past.
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Why would Scrooge keep a taxidermied boar in his chambers, exactly?
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I could have used more of Kelsey Grammer and Jason Alexander as Marley having a passive-aggressive poke-fight; at least he seems to be having some fun here, and can actually do musical theatre, unlike Grammer.
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Or maybe not, because admittedly, the two do not really have physical comedy styles that work well together.
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The low-budget Halloween haunted house attraction-grade sequence where Marley menaces Scrooge with an army of money-themed body horror zombies? Actually pretty fun.
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After a fairly energetic first act, this thing just starts dragging considerably, and Jesse L. Martin as a music hall-inflected Christmas Present doesn’t really save it.
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However, Christmas Future’s segment does include a spooky camp bit with choreographed gravediggers circling Scrooge and taunting him about who’s going to piss on his grave, which, nice? (I mean, they’re saying “walk on your grave” because this is TV, but the sentiment is clear.)
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IMO, you can gauge the overall quality of a Christmas Carol adaptation pretty well by the delivery of the iconic lines, and Grammer is not good on that count; he delivers “Are there no prisons,” “Tell me if Tiny Tim will live,” “Show me no more” and his part of the “Why, Christmas Day” dialogue as utter mush.
FINAL RATING: 4/10. Mildly fun as a bizarre artifact of NBC network culture in the early 2000s, but not recommended otherwise.