Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Heiress and the Handyman’ on Hallmark Channel, A Warm, Fuzzy Romance About A Woman Who Loses Her Fortune But Finds Love

Jodie Sweetin stars in The Heiress and the Handyman , a Hallmark Channel rom-com about a woman who loses her fortune and is forced to move to the country where she falls for a local farmer. With its autumnal vibes and charming cast of supporting characters, it will get you ready for a season spent curled up on the couch watching cozy romance.

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Opening Shot: A wealthy blonde woman named June Waltshire (Jodie Sweetin) sits at an outdoor table at a restaurant in Greece where the waiter hands her a telephone and says she has an urgent call. “There’s been a crypto crash!” her finance guy tells her before urging her to get back to New York.

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The Gist: When June Waltshire was 14, she inherited her family’s wealth and lived a life of luxury that only the super-rich can understand: summer in the Hamptons, autumn in Greece, winter in Gstaad, all that good stuff. But when she abruptly loses all of her money, she realizes she’s screwed – the only things she’s allowed to keep are a flip phone and an old town car. June finds herself working odd jobs until she learns that her dead Aunt Birdie left her a country house upstate, so she hightails it up there. June expects to find a full staff who will cater to her every need, but instead, she finds a neighbor named Bart (Corey Sevier) that she wrongly assumes is a handyman, and a pig named Jillian.

Bart is obviously not the live-in staff, but he does offer to help June manage the home and farm she’s inherited. Bart’s sister Nina (Ann Pirvu) also proves to be a friend an ally for June, and she and Bart encourage June to take up her Aunt Birdie’s legacy of entering the pie contest at the Fall Fair in order to defeat local pie curmudgeon Dotty Cartwright (Eve Crawford). (June has never baked a pie in her life, but declares that, since she went to Oxford, how hard can it be?)

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[INSERT PIE-MAKING MONTAGE! THE PIE TASTES BAD!]

As June adapts to her new environs and learns how to properly care for the farm, she and Bart grow closer and realize they have more in common than they first realized. Bart is more worldly than he seems, June is more vulnerable and warm that the impression she gives off, etc. etc.

The day of the big Fall Fair, June goes head to head against Dotty and her pie – using Aunt Birdie’s recipe – wins. (And Jillian the pig win’s best in show.)

When June gets home, not only does she get a call from a farm supply company asking her to sign a very lucrative contract for Jillian to be used as their mascot, but she also gets a call from her finance guy, who reveals he found a massive stock portfolio that will turn June very rich again. High on this new cashflow, June takes Bart out to a concert hall she has rented out just for the two of them and she (accurately) deciphers that he has feelings for her but (inaccurately) thinks that inviting him to drop their small-town lives and farms and travel the world would be the best move. Bart is disappointed that June feels unattached to the life she’s created for herself, and tells her he wants to stay put.

June of course has a change of heart and decides that home is where her pig is – and where the handyman is, too, because it wouldn’t be a Hallmark movie if it ended any other way.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While watching The Heiress and the Handyman , I was reminded of another Hallmark movie, An Easter Bloom , about a woman who enters a flower-arranging contest to keep her father’s legacy and family farm afloat (and falls in love in the process).

Our Take: The Heiress and the Handyman is filled with stereotypes of vapid rich people (private jets and Fashion Week and not understanding how to exist in the world!) as well as country folk who couldn’t possibly have been to cosmopolitan cities and such. But per usual in a Hallmark joint, all of these stereotypes exist just to be broken down and allowing the characters to realize that people’s experiences in general are more universal than we assume.

The Heiress and the Handyman ‘s version of that parable is fairly generic, but I found myself invested in the movies and rooting for the characters who felt fleshed out and genuinely seemed to be having fun, rather than coming off as overly earnest or moralistic. These movies can run a fine line between charming and saccharine, and this one is the former.

Parting Shot: When June returns to her house in the country, she finds it filled with people. Nina, in an effort to make June realize she has more family than she realizes, has found several locals who were all related to June or her Aunt Birdie and invited them to surprise June. Bart is also there (prompting June to ask, “You’re not my cousin, are you?” which genuinely made me lol) before she professes her love for him and kissing him.

Performance Worth Watching: There are a couple of impressive supporting roles in the film. As June’s assistant Tyler, Deepak Matthews manages to express the perfect combination of adoration for his boss and blunt no-nonsense truth bombs about her new station, though his appearance is all too brief. Ann Pirvu is also excellent as Nina, and she brings so much warmth to the film.

Memorable Dialogue: “What… is this?” June asks her assistant Tyler hands her a flip phone after he reveals all her assets are frozen and all of her belongings are being repossessed. “It’s pre-paid!” he says jauntily.

Our Call: STREAM IT! The Heiress and the Handyman is what you might call “ classic Hallmark. ” Sure, it has a lot of heart and a couple of laughs, but mostly it’s just an ensemble of cozy characters in the movie equivalent of a cup of hot apple cider sipped around a fire.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction .

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