Severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings issued for Twin Cities metro area

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

Hailing a cab in Duluth. Eating snow fallen next to a city street. Portraying the University of Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs as a perpetually-losing hockey team.  

These are just a few of the headscratchers that make a strange trip out of “Merry Kiss Cam,” a new rom-com on Hulu that was filmed and set in Duluth. 

The premise of this Hallmark-esque holiday fluff is this: Jess, a widow and the afterschool special version of a “serious” artist (played by a cheerily world-weary Katie Lowes), and legacy bar owner and hockey fan Danny (a slightly desperate and bumbling Jesse Bradford) have a meet-cute when she walks into his place of work.

He invites her to a Bulldogs hockey game for a first date, where the kiss cam lands on them. They smooch, and shortly afterwards the fictionally-lousy team wins. And so, Bulldogs fans adopt their broadcasted embraces as a lucky charm. Queue many, many kiss cam montages. 

 and features Duluthian actor Bailey Stender and UMD alum Benny Elledge (both are quite funny; stay to watch Elledge riff when the credits roll). Riki McManus, chief production officer for the Upper Midwest Film Office, calls it a “a love letter to Duluth.” 

Longtime UMD film and theater professor Tom Isbell also weighed in. 

"’Merry Kiss Cam’" was like ‘Titanic’ around here,” says Isbell (full disclosure: I took his fantastic Intro to Film class back in 2002, and then was a teacher’s assistant for his class the next semester). “When the filmmakers were in town, it was all people could talk about.” 

“Merry Kiss Cam” is cheery, and for Minnesotan and Duluthian viewers, as asinine as it is benign.  

I went to school at the University of Minnesota Duluth in the early aughts. While I’ve visited several times after graduating, I haven’t lived there since 2008. To bolster my critic skills on a recent snowy evening, I 

live tweeted a viewing and asked for more Duluth (and hockey)-savvy folk to chime in

For your holiday bemusement, here is some fodder from me and the Minnesota Twitterverse to stuff in your stocking. 

According to the Upper Midwest Film Office, “Merry Kiss Cam” producer 

Mandy June Turpin already returned to shoot “Body Language.”

 It wrapped in November and should be released in late 2023. So, here’s to the next Twitter watch party.  

In the meantime, may all the taxis you hail stop promptly. 

Arts and Culture

NewsPartners

Instagram

Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund

Alex V. Cipolle

Author

‘Merry Kiss Cam’ was set and filmed in Duluth, but according to senior arts reporter and critic Alex V. Cipolle, the film’s version of the northern city leaves a little to be desired.

What Hulu rom-com 'Merry Kiss Cam' gets wrong about Duluth

Go Deeper.

Like this?