In Hulu’s festive rom-com, Joy (Emmanuelle Chriqui) is a celebrity lifestyle writer whose career is built on her domestic goddess image. But when a TV crew inexplicably invites itself to her home for a live Christmas special, she risks being exposed as an unmarried and childless woman, and presumably sent to some sort of prison camp for her crimes against family values.

Despite being the most famous woman in Disney’s dystopian America, Joy has somehow kept up the lie of having a family without anyone doing the most basic research into her life. The defence that she is a private person makes no sense when her entire output exploits the details of her home life. This almost veers into commentary on the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of celebrity, but as a Hallmark-style Christmas movie, Joy to the World is about nothing more than the virtues of the nuclear family, and how every rich, white person deserves a second chance.

Before you can say Chad Michael Murray, Chad Michael Murray shows up as the friend Joy inevitably asks to pretend to be her husband for the cameras, as well as the goose artist in residence (don’t ask). She also enlists some local children who have apparently been abandoned over Christmas, and her postman and housekeeper to pose as her parents; the implication being that they all have to live there forever to save her the indignity of having to get a real job.

All this dubious and saccharine nonsense adds up to a film so forgettable that if you were to leave it in the oven your house would burn down. Which it turns out would still be preferable to watching Netflix’s rival holiday offering, Jingle Bell Heist, whose obnoxious characters make Joy look like her name stands for something other than a cheating excuse for a pun title. Ultimately it all works out for our festive fraudster, as it turns out the only thing the American public love more than a Christian conservative is someone pretending to be one.