Lifetime Channel is moving on from the almost-kiss — well, sort of.
This season’s “It’s a Wonderful Lifetime” slate of 12 new movies includes “A Cowboy Christmas Romance,” a holiday movie that features the franchise’s first sex scene.
“We think that there’s an audience out there that’s hungry for grown-up romance, and we’re looking forward to adding some smolder to the usual holiday sugar and spice,” Tia Maggini, SVP of scripted content at Lifetime, exclusively tells Variety. “We love trying new things, and we’re excited about this new ‘first’ for us for a holiday movie.”
The movie, starring Jana Kramer and Adam Senn and debuting on Dec. 9, follows a real estate agent who returns home to Arizona to reclaim land belonging to a rancher. Not only do sparks fly, but she also gets a chance to reconnect with her family — all the fixings for the perfect Christmas movie.
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Kramer teased the scene during the latest episode of iHeartRadio’s “Whine Down” podcast, with Sarah Drew, who wrote the movie, as her guest.
“Spoiler alert — he lays me down on some hay, and then we, you know,” Kramer said during Monday’s episode. “Obviously, it’s still Lifetime, it’s still family. But it was pushing limits there, too… They didn’t cut anything. I was so happy that they really left it all in there.”
Drew was happy with how the scene came out, thanking Maggini and explaining that she wrote another sexy scene that also stayed in.
“It all came out so beautifully, but especially the scene in the kitchen. I had written into the stage directions, ‘He pulls her up onto the counter, he shoves things off the table,’” the “Grey’s Anatomy” alum explained. “I put it all in there, so I was like, ‘Don’t take the steam and the sex away from me. I wrote it on purpose, I want it in there.'”
Kramer, who has now starred in eight Lifetime movies, said “A Cowboy Christmas Romance” is unlike any other that she’s done.
“We barely mention the word ‘Christmas.’ There’s no gingerbread bake-off, there’s no festival, that town that’s going to hell and you gotta save it,” she said. “The only thing was, like, [my character] coming back and seeing Adam or his character… Those cozy feelings happen, but it’s all mixed up with real family stuff and identity stuff and relationship stuff.”