I think that most city folk have an idealized conception of what real commercial farm life is like.  These movies don't show you the getting up at 5:00 in the morning part; the back-breaking labor all day long part; or the endless hours of.......nothing.......part.  In addition, there's also the fact that most farms aren't located in picturesque settings -- with glorious snow-capped mountains or beautiful blue lakes as a backdrop.  No, most real commercial farms tend to be dirty, smelly places -- with the distinct aroma of hog feces constantly floating in the air.  It's not exactly the most romantic of settings.

Also -- it seems that the main characters in these types of movies never have to worry about mundane matters like paying the bills -- they've got all of the time in the world to do nothing but play with the farm animals as if a commercial farm was nothing but a petting zoo.

I've been to many small towns, just like I've been to many large cities.  The fact is that people in small towns have their own personal issues, too.......the populations are just as human as their big-city cousins.  And most small-town types aren't rollin' in dough and living on 200 acres of land with a 15-bedroom main house.  Many of them live in trailers set up on concrete blocks, instead.  It's true that life can move slower in the country -- but the "simple people" who live there aren't always nice.  No more so than gang-bangers from Hell's Kitchen.  Human nature is the same in both places -- it's just found in different settings.  And many small town folk -- especially the young ones -- want nothing more than to leave their dreary, boring small town & escape to the Big City.

But hey -- to point these things out is to ruin the fantasy.  And fantasy is what these types of movies are all about.  However: in my veiw, these types of movies can actually be harmful to some in that they seem to offer simple solutions for problems which can almost never be solved simply in the RW.  "Human Interest" stories rarely show what humans are actually like......their petty cruelty, their self-centeredness, their hatefulness.  These types of moives come from a premise which assumes that all people (except for the 2-dimensional Evil Capitalist & his henchmen) are basically good.  Well, they aren't.  In the RW, the Evil Capitalist is actually usually the Good Guy -- the guy who brings badly-needed jobs to the area and who feeds the local families in the process.  And most Evil Capitalists have no interest in arbitrarily shooting the beautiful wild mustangs merely for the sport of killing them.  Afer all, where's the dividend in doing that?  But that's the standard movie stereotype of the Evil Capitalist.

Personally, I'd like to see a Hallmark movie made where the farm is in danger of being taken away and shut down by Evil Environmentalists who have discovered that there's a 'rare' speckled ding beetle population at the back of the property.  Or that the farm will be confiscated by an Evil Local Government Bureaucrat With A Desire To Exercise Petty Authority who has determined that the 30 acres of land which are under 0.25" of water for 3 days a year comprises a "wetland": and therefore the farmer has to shut down all operations.  Those types of situations would be far closer to the realities of threats against family farms in today's world than is the stock movie bogeyman caricature of the Evil Capitalist who has an insatiable lust to build a nasty, polluting chemical plant on the farm property: and longs to kill all of the cute, furry animals to boot.  No -- today's farmer gets far more grief from the government and from zealot-like environmentalists than he does from any sneering, moustache-twirling Evil Capitalists.

But those facts don't fit the Accepted Template For Villanous Types -- so the movie won't be seen on Hallmark.  It'll always be the job-creating capitalist who wears the Black Cowboy Hat in these films.

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