In 1910, Joyce Clyde Hall, an entrepreneurial Nebraska teen-ager and the son of a Methodist minister, took a train to Kansas City, Missouri, bringing with him two boxes of postcards. Printed postcards had become a hot commodity, and Hall had a talent for sales. In 1914, he and his older brother Rollie formed a company called Hall Brothers, opened a shop, and began printing their own greeting cards and paper goods. The First World War was a turning point for the industry: servicemen and their loved ones enjoyed sending and receiving cards and became lifelong card buyers. “And I saw something else in the custom,” Hall wrote in his 1979 memoir, “When You Care Enough”: “A way of giving less articulate people, and those who tend to disguise their feelings, a voice to express their love and affection.” In 1916, Hall Brothers began printing cards that came with their own envelopes; in 1917, they invented modern wrapping paper.

The brothers began using the name Hallmark, after a goldsmith’s stamp of quality, in 1928, and later paired it with a crown logo. By mid-century, Hallmark had pioneered a new card-display technique, similar to what we still see in drugstores; formed partnerships with Disney and Norman Rockwell; and built a huge headquarters, in Kansas City. In the process, the company became so intertwined with the idea of holiday celebration that the term “Hallmark holiday” entered the public vocabulary, connoting a holiday rooted as much in commercialism as in tradition.

In 1951, Joyce Hall wrote to his sales team, “Dear Fellows: We’re going to try our hand at television.” Inspired by the medium’s educational and entertainment possibilities, he wanted Hallmark to deliver edifying fare. That year, the company sponsored the first original opera written for television, “Amahl and the Night Visitors”; later, under the name Hallmark Hall of Fame, it sponsored TV productions of literary adaptations, Broadway plays, and, in time, original films. It became the most award-winning franchise in television history, with eighty-one Emmys.

Hallmark formed Crown Media in 1991, and ventured into cable. Later that decade, it bought an interest in the religious network Odyssey, which, in 2001, it took over fully, renaming it the Hallmark Channel. According to Bill Abbott, who ran Crown’s advertising sales from 2000 to 2009, before becoming its C.E.O., “the strategy at the outset wasn’t to draw close to the brand. It didn’t really have a filter.” For a decade, the channel aired motley family entertainment, Hallmark Hall of Fame films, and original movies, made by an independent producer.

There were a few standouts. One was the eleven-film “Love Comes Softly” series, released from 2003 to 2011. Based on novels by the Canadian evangelical-Christian writer Janette Oke, the movies are lightly religious frontier dramas set out West. I watched several around 2009; inside the films’ covered wagons and behind their butter churns, I discovered, yellow-haired TV stars like Katherine Heigl and January Jones were living lives of noble forbearance. There were occasional speeches about the Lord, but there was also hardship and heart, à la “Little House on the Prairie”—if Pa hurt his leg, a handsome stranger would help plow the fields. Other films were set in a down-home romanticized present, among characters who proudly respect sentimental art. Some of them praise Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade; in one film, a painter feels betrayed, but then grateful, when her art is used in an ad campaign. “Art is about creativity and being a free spirit,” she says in Act IX, just before the kiss. “It’s not restrictive or rigid, so why should I be?” Her painting is of Santa Claus.

These series and films, along with “The Christmas Card,” a surprisingly effective love story between a soldier and a mill owner’s daughter, from 2006, helped inspire Abbott, when he became C.E.O., in 2009, to push Hallmark to “embody the brand on TV.” “I love greeting cards and I love Hallmark stores,” Abbott told me when I met him at Hallmark’s Manhattan offices. To him, the stores give a sense of “comfort, positivity, connections.” “You should turn on our channel and almost feel like you’re walking into a Gold Crown store,” he said. Abbott is fifty-seven, with thinning gray hair, a warm, confident demeanor, and an adenoidal vocal quality, like a man powering through a cold. He told me that he had been influenced, too, by the distinctive two-minute Hallmark-card commercials that had aired during the Hall of Fame broadcasts, starting in the sixties, which became famous for making viewers cry. In “The Music Professor,” from 1983, a girl races to arrive at a piano lesson before her teacher and hides a card between the pages of her sheet music. When he finds it, both struggle to contain their emotions.

Abbott and his executive team, including Michelle Vicary, Crown Media’s executive vice-president of programming and network publicity, developed a strategy of “leaning into Christmas.” Vicary, who works at Crown Media’s Los Angeles headquarters, began her career in music sales, working with bands including Nirvana, Hole, and Mudhoney, but shifted gears because of her “passion for television,” she told me. (She has been with Crown Media since its beginning.) In 2015, Crown started its own production company, taking control of development, costumes, locations, casting, and post-production. Abbott and Vicary read every script and watch every movie. The Christmas movies are generally shot in fifteen days, in minimal takes and with maximum efficiency, in affordable, often Canadian, locations; they use “actuals”—existing locations, not soundstages. Abbott and Vicary coached the development team to be “brand ambassadors,” who insure that each element of a production has a distinctive Hallmark feel, down to the decorative mise en scène. Vicary told me, “We’re not afraid to look at the dailies and call them up and say, ‘Not enough Christmas.’ ”

In 2014, Hallmark aired “Christmas Under Wraps,” starring Candace Cameron Bure, who in childhood co-starred on “Full House,” alongside another Hallmark actor, Lori Loughlin. Bure plays a big-city doctor who finds love in Garland, Alaska, which, she correctly suspects, is home to Santa’s workshop. “I guess when it comes down to it, a patient is a patient,” she says, wide-eyed, icing Rudy the Reindeer’s leg. At the beginning, she is striving for a prestigious Boston surgical fellowship; by the end, she has everything she needs right there in Garland. The movie was a “breakthrough,” Abbott said. Soon afterward, the company ramped up production.

The Bure breakthrough was a bit like the plot of “Christmas Under Wraps”: Hallmark had discovered that it had everything it needed—positivity, reassurance, sentimentality, and cozy salesmanship—right there in Garland. At that point, the Hallmark Channel had a steady audience of older viewers, but it began bringing in younger ones by casting prominent actors who had starred in edgy teen fare of the two-thousands—Jesse Metcalfe, Chad Michael Murray—and putting them in sweaters and Santa hats. There was something for middle-aged viewers, too—a divorced heroine wooed by a sensitive major-league baseball player, for example, who teaches her son to catch. The movies’ seasonal themes began to venture beyond Christmas, and holiday decorating—even for Halloween or Valentine’s Day—provided a way for characters to bond. (Since the seventies, Hallmark Cards has sold Christmas ornaments and holiday decorations.)

As the strategy started to succeed, Hallmark further expanded its fare, introducing a morning show (“Home & Family,” shot in a free-standing house on the Universal lot) and, in 2014, Hallmark Movies and Mysteries, the sister channel, whose titles include “Murder, She Baked: A Peach Cobbler Mystery,” and whose programming broadened, slightly, the company’s tonal register. (In one film, Bure finds a human skull.) Often, at a mystery’s climax, there’s a moment of cathartic, justified violence—for example, a woman clonking a would-be murderer over the head with a piece of pottery. In regular Hallmark Channel films, violence is so seldom seen that even allusions to it can be shocking—such as in “From Friend to Fiancé,” from 2018, when a party scene at a paintball range features a shot of people wielding semiautomatic paintball guns. When I mentioned the off note to Abbott, he said, “That’s a movie we did not write the script for.” It had been produced independently, and guns weren’t its only problem. “It got past all of us that the word ‘suck’ is used in the movie,” Abbott said. He grew animated. “I was so mad at myself for not catching it. It’s a word that has become frighteningly close to no longer being part of the four-letter-word category. It’s a—it’s just a negative, it’s demeaning. It shouldn’t be on our channel.” They edited it out.