STUDIO CITY, Ca. — The Hallmark Movie Channel has announced that its centerpiece holiday movie this year will be a love story between a small-town girl and a US service member with a drinking problem. The film, A Lobster Dinner Christmas, is also set to be Hallmark’s most gritty and realistic portrayal of love within this genre. The story, set in the coastal town of Winter Harbor, Maine, focuses on Jessica “Jessie” Peters, a 10th-generation lobster fisherwoman and Capt. Blake Hampton, a Navy soldier

Capt. Hampton is a hard-working, hard-drinking soldier who comes to Winter Harbor looking for lobster but ends up finding love. Peters, on the other hand, is the only daughter of a fishing dynasty who wants to bring her family’s lobster business into the 21st century. Both main characters have little time for love and have their own issues to sort out.

“We wanted our conflict to be real this time,” said Molly Fraser, the screenwriter for the film. “Usually, the central problem is that a girl lawyer falls in love with Santa Claus or that a lumberjack meets an ad executive and misses killing trees in the forest. Here, we wrote Blake as an alcoholic, and Jessie as kind of a nag because that is more true to life. We make real films here at Hallmark now.”