How long has it been since you looked at your phone? Was your screen time up 20% last week, too? With the holidays upon us, it’s a great time to be intentional with our time and present with those around us. Jana Kramer agrees, and has shared what filming Lifetime’s The Holiday Fix Up taught her about being present in the social media age.
The Holiday Fix Up is part of the It’s A Wonderful Lifetime holiday movie lineup and stars Jana Kramer and Ryan McPartlin as exes who reunite for a renovation project. Kramer’s character, Sam, is a well-known interior designer who’s been challenged by her boss to use social media to let her fans see more of her sensitive side. I recently participated in a press conference in support of It’s A Wonderful Lifetime and asked Kramer, who also serves as an Executive Producer on the film, how this social media angle came about. Here’s what she said:
I think what I learned…actually, yes, we showed how it can bring people together, but, for me, personally, what I took away from the movie the most is actually about putting the phone down… where it’s back in the day when we didn’t have the cell phones and we were able to just disconnect and be in a room together and not be glued to Instagram or the phone. And that’s what I took away from it the most – it is just having that distraction away to really just be present with the people in front of me. So that’s something that I would like to lean more into.
Jana Kramer is very social media savvy, particularly on Instagram where she gives fans a window into her life as an actress, country singer, podcast host, single mom, author, and so much more. What’s cool is that her character in The Holiday Fix Up, Sam, has no idea how to use social media. Sam eventually learns how being vulnerable on social media can bring people closer together, and while telling this story Kramer also learned the importance of disconnecting.
Co-star and fellow Executive Producer Ryan McPartlin also shared his take on social media that will give fans a lot to think about. His character, Coop, doesn’t have any social accounts and still uses a flip phone. While that sounds like a nightmare to some and a dream to others, there are pros and cons to everything. Here’s what McPartlin shared:
I think that social media caught us all by storm and there were no rules. There was no teaching moment. We didn’t come up in school with teachers saying ‘you should compartmentalize this.’ And then the job of these apps and the social media companies is to see how many hours they can get out of your day spent on these apps. So, there is a lot of benefit to it and there’s a lot of businesses that thrive from it. Our small business that we have came about because of social media and there’s a lot of charities that do very well -- but it is a danger, and it’s going to be. It’s interesting that the back-and-forth that our characters had about compartmentalizing and what to use it for, and how to use it. I think that’s a real conversation that should be had in every household right now.
Ryan McPartlin is right on the money here. There are truly so many wonderful things about social networking apps and there are so many detrimental aspects of them. It’s all about balance, as the characters show us in The Holiday Fix Up. Not only do the two characters reconnect to renovate an Inn that is near to both of their hearts, but they also learn the different paths they’ve taken in life and how growing a social media following helped one of them thrive while the other stayed away from it.
The Holiday Fix Up airs on Lifetime on December 11 at 8/7 c. There are so many delightful films full of holiday cheer and life lessons in the It’s A Wonderful Lifetime lineup, so don’t miss a single one. We’ve also created a 2021 Christmas movies and TV schedule just for you.
