Fixing Pete

The Hallmark Channel scrapes the bottom of the barrel -- I hope -- in this would-be knock-off of WOMAN OF THE YEAR. He's an incoherent sportswriter who doesn't own a shirt with a collar who has written a book. She's an obsessive-compulsive control freak who does some sort of makeover show for the paper's affiliated TV station, called upon to give him a makeover for his upcoming book tour. Of course they fall in love, but first we have to endure ninety-minutes of obnoxious pretty people. At least they probably are obnoxious. We are given no more sense of who they are than I have just given you. Our only reason to wish them well is that their friends are even more overtly annoying than they; he's got a stoner friend and she's got a self-involved boyfriend and a looks-obsessed girlfriend.

No one expects anything new in the way of story lines. This one was old when Shakespeare set Benedict and Beatrice wrangling. Still, if the hacks who produced this wish us to look at this plot yet again, they need to give us something: characters we can care about, situations that are novel or a couple of jokes that are well told. This one offers the viewer nothing, except that they are good-looking young people. So are their vile friends and I don't care a fig about any of them.