chill out with these

12 best Christmas movies to binge during the Houston arctic freeze

Yes, this is a Christmas movie.

Die Hard Movies/20th Century Fox/Facebook

Few things say "Netflix and chill" like a literal arctic freeze. As Houston preps for at least two days of freezing temperatures, many are wisely staying indoors, camped out in front of the TV.

With that in mind, we've rounded up our favorite holiday movies to steam and, natch, binge. Many our classics, some are kooky comedies, and one sparks a dispute if it's even a holiday movie at all.

Stay warm and add these to your queue and watchlist as you wait out our below-30s temps. Here's our list of what to binge in Houston.

Best Christmas movie (more than 50 years old)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

With help from his guardian angel, a suicidal-on-Christmas Jimmy Stewart finds out how messed up life would be if he wasn’t around. Honestly, you should know this movie backwards and forwards by now.

Best Christmas movie (more than 25 years old)
A Christmas Story (1983)

You most likely know this movie backwards and forwards, since TBS usually shows this all the freakin’ time during the holidays. Nevertheless, the saga of little Ralphie Parker getting a BB gun for Christmas is a timeless standard. And we sure love Dad and his Major Award.

Best adaption of A Christmas Carol — for kids
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1993)

No doubt your little ones will enjoy the sight of the Charles Dickens classic being recreated by Kermit, Gonzo, Miss Piggy and them, with Michael Caine killing it as the one-and-only Ebenezer Scrooge.

Best adaption of A Christmas Carol — for adults
Scrooged (1988)

Bill Murray assumes the Scrooge role as a morally bankrupt TV exec who learns the true meaning of Christmas. Robert Mitchum, Karen Allen, Alfre Woodard, Carol Kane and Bobcat Goldthwait are a few of the folk who appear in this all-star holiday jam.

Best Christmas horror flick
Black Christmas (1974)

Forget about the two recent remakes. The original, directed by A Christmas Story’s Bob Clark and starring Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder as sorority girls being terrorized by a killer during the holidays, is still the bloody standard.

Best foul-mouthed Christmas movie starring Billy Bob Thornton
Bad Santa (2003)

Although his 2005 black-comic caper The Ice Harvest comes a close second, nothing beats this R-rated laugh riot. Thornton plays a miserable, drunken, department-store Santa who tries to pull off a crime while instilling some holiday cheer in a little boy.

Best Christmas movie from Shane Black
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

A pre-Iron Man Robert Downey, Jr. and a pre-throat cancer Val Kilmer become a pair of unlikely sleuths in this sarcastic neo-noir, one of many flicks the writer/director (Lethal Weapon, The Nice Guys) has set during the holiday season.

Best little-known Christmas movie
Comfort & Joy (1984)

Coming straight from Scotland, Local Hero director Bill Forsyth did an offbeat holiday flick where a DJ (Bill Paterson) gets over a breakup while reluctantly becoming part of a turf war between rival ice-cream vendors.

Best Christmas movie for goths
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

We’re sure all those kids who grew up wearing black and listening to The Cure rejoiced when producer Tim Burton and director Henry Selick joined forces for a stop-motion animated flick where a Halloween-minded dude aims to take over Christmas.

Best LGBT Christmas movie
Tangerine (2015)

Before he went on to make the Oscar-nominated The Florida Project, filmmaker Sean Baker did this unlikely holiday film about a transgender sex worker (transgender actress Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) who spends Christmas Eve looking for her cheating boyfriend/pimp.

Best budding Christmas movie
Friday After Next (2002)

The final installment in Ice Cube’s hood-comedy trilogy has him and Mike Epps serving as strip-mall security guards ducking thugs, angry grandmothers, and a gift-jacking Santa. They still find time to get high though.

Best Christmas movie that is indisputably a Christmas movie — The End
Die Hard (1988)

Bruce Willis, terrorists, explosions – blah, blah, blah. We know it came out during the summer. But all of it happened on Christmas Eve, so it’s a Christmas movie. We’re done talking about it—let the debates begin!

Steven Devadanam contributed to this story.

HOWDY, DOCTORS

Grey's Anatomy spins off new medical drama led by Houston-born showrunner

Photo via Meg Marinis/Instagram

Showrunner Meg Marinis poses with actor Kevin McKidd, who recently exited Grey's Anatomy after more than a decade playing Dr. Owen Hunt.

ABC is bringing the Grey's Anatomy universe to Texas with a new one-hour rural medical drama co-created by longtime showrunner Meg Marinis. Marinis was born in Houston and is an alum of both the Kinkaid School and the University of Texas at Austin.

According to an exclusive report from Deadline, which production company Shondaland shared on social media, the untitled series has received a straight-to-series order from ABC and will follow a team at a rural West Texas medical center described as “the last chance for care before miles of nowhere.”

The series marks the first Grey’s Anatomy franchise show set outside the West Coast, and it's the first that's not centered around an existing main character from the original series.

The new drama will be co-created by Shonda Rhimes and Marinis, who has spent nearly two decades working on Grey’s Anatomy. She joined the series during its third season as a production assistant before rising through the ranks to become a researcher, writer, executive producer, and now showrunner.

"This opportunity will bring new characters and stories to life that will embody the same heart, emotion, and connection audiences have loved from Grey’s for more than two decades, all set in my home state of Texas,” Marinis said in a statement announcing the series. "I am so grateful to Shonda Rhimes for creating this dynamic world and feel so fortunate that I get to be a part of it.”

Marinis’ path to running one of television’s biggest franchises started in Austin. In an interview with Shondaland last year, she recounted moving to Los Angeles during her final semester at UT through the university’s UTLA entertainment program, which allows students to complete coursework while interning in the industry. While finishing school, she interned at Universal before landing a production assistant role on Grey’s Anatomy in 2006.

Marinis has also woven Texas experiences into the flagship series itself in recent years. According to Deadline, she personally knew families affected by the Camp Mystic tragedy and rewrote part of a recent Grey’s Anatomy episode after becoming emotional while working on the script.

The West Texas setting is particularly timely, as rural healthcare access remains a growing issue across the state. According to the Texas Hospital Association, more than 20 rural Texas hospitals have closed since 2010, while roughly a quarter of the state’s remaining rural hospitals are considered at risk of closure.

By centering the new series on what ABC describes as “the last chance for care before miles of nowhere,” the franchise could bring national attention to healthcare access challenges facing communities across West Texas and other rural parts of the state.

The new series joins a long lineage of Texas-set television dramas, though not all were actually filmed in the state. Grey’s Anatomy itself is famously set in Seattle while primarily filmed in the Los Angeles area. Friday Night Lights became closely associated with Austin through extensive local filming, while series like Dallas often recreated Texas from California sound stages, with exteriors of Southfork Ranch serving as the Ewings' fictitious home. Walker, Texas Ranger, meanwhile, became one of the best-known examples of a network drama heavily filmed across Texas itself.

Even after more than 20 years on the air, Grey’s Anatomy remains one of television’s most durable franchises. According to ABC, the drama is now the longest-running primetime medical drama in television history and continues to rank among the network’s strongest scripted performers.

Ellen Pompeo, who stars as Dr. Meredith Grey in the original series, is attached as an executive producer, and the new drama is expected to premiere in 2027.

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