Live HistoricSee what matters.

Series · Hallmark Channel · 2016

Pass it on

Chesapeake Shores

65Worth an evening.

A family that scatters and a house that calls them back. Worth an evening if you talk after.

The review

Abby has the successful life, which in this story means she is far from the people who know her middle name. The inn is failing, the sisters are raw, the father is proud. Hallmark will sand the edges. The edges worth keeping are these: a family business is a moral fact, a divorce does not end the duty to your children, and a town you helped make can still ask you to show up.

Watch it when your own people are scattered and you have been calling the distance a personality. It is a comfortable show. Comfort is fine if you let it convict you a little. If you only want the water and the sweaters, you can get those cheaper than an hour of your evening.

Journal

Keep Chesapeake Shores in the record.

No house has filed a sentence for this yet.

Live Historic number 65. Yours can differ.

The glance

Piety is the thin one.

Can conscience actually stop someone, or is reverence only in the shot so it can be mocked?

This phone is set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.

Consider this

Adolescence

78 instead of 65

Adolescence is still a drama show, and it scores 78 instead of 65. What you gain is truth: It is obsessed with what was missed, said, and lied about.

The eight

6
Industry
An inn, a career, a father who builds. Work is present and sometimes abandoned.
8
Household
Siblings, a broken marriage, a grandmother. Coming home is the moral event.
5
Piety
The town has a memory. A creed is mostly manners.
6
Courage
Returning is harder than staying gone, and the show admits it.
7
Republic
A town their father built still expects something of them.
7
Temperance
Romance is the spice. It is not allowed to erase the brothers and sisters.
6
Truth
Old grievances have to be said before the inn is safe.
7
Stewardship
The question is whether the next child will have a shore to come back to.

Where to watch

Finding the page.

Live Historic · Chesapeake Shores · 65IMDb tt5151816

Live HistoricSee what matters.

Series · Hallmark Channel · 2013

Pass it on

Cedar Cove

70Worth an evening.

A judge, a newspaper, a town that still has to look each other in the face. Solid, not grand.

The review

Debbie Macomber's town runs on people who still have to greet each other after the verdict. That is the republican part, and it is the part worth keeping. Olivia Lockhart is a judge who cannot leave the robe at the office, because her own family keeps walking into the kind of trouble she sentences in other people.

It will not change a life the way a harder film will. It will remind a tired adult that a town is made of particular promises: a lighthouse kept, a paper printed, a ruling explained. Watch one season if you want a story in which the neighbors are not the enemy. Then keep one local promise you have been treating as optional.

Journal

Keep Cedar Cove in the record.