There’s nothing surprising about The Shell Collector, the debut original film on Fox News Media’s streaming platform, Fox Nation. Media companies are hungry for original content to win market share among the morass of competing platforms. Fox News Media seeks to expand its conservative empire through Fox Nation’s slate of real estate, lifestyle and reality programming. Films like The Shell Collector, a beachside romance about a military widow falling for her late husband’s best friend, are relatively cheap to produce and amenable to viewers less into, say, the testicle-tanning fearmongering of one Tucker Carlson.
The Shell Collector, which premiered this week, is thus notable as a stake in the ground for Fox’s investment in soft power. It’s “family values” carried on the ocean breeze of a beige, uncomplicated love story, an inexpensive, in-house method for palliating the network’s core message of white Christian theocracy to those outside the traditional Fox News demographic. Namely: younger (white) women. “These films are definitely targeting the female Fox News fan,” Fox Nation’s president, Jason Klarman, told the Hollywood Reporter last month. Original films like The Shell Collector “will absolutely attract her, and creating unique originals that she can’t get anywhere else is certainly part of the strategy to drive growth”.
It’s a strategic play by Fox Nation, which launched in 2018 as an explicit home for Fox News “superfans”. But though Fox Nation houses original programming from Fox News hosts like Carlson, it has in recent years pivoted to expanding the older, male-skewing Fox viewer base beyond boomer-centric culture wars. It has beefed up its reality and lifestyle options – Duck Family Treasure, a treasure-hunting spinoff of the A&E series Duck Dynasty; Mansion Global, which tours mega-mansions and luxury properties; a docuseries called Historic Battles For America, narrated by Kelsey Grammer.
It acquired a backlog of conservative-skewing films, such as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Christmas movies and classics by famously Republican Clint Eastwood. It built up a library aimed at younger men, such as the military-themed show Modern Warriors and the revival of police ride-along show Cops, a vehicle for the dangerous, inaccurate valorization of police violence canceled by Paramount during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Nancy Grace also hosts a true-crime program, Crime Stories.
The Shell Collector, based on a novel by Nancy Naigle, is the first of four announced original in-house films, allegedly to premiere every few months and explicitly designed to attract female viewers. (The Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox Corporation once owned a storied Hollywood studio, 20th Century Fox, which produced film and television out of line with company’s conservative ethos – the 2016 film Hidden Figures, for example, or 2018’s The Hate U Give, a young adult film of anti-black police brutality. Murdoch sold 20th Century Fox to Disney in 2019 in an assets deal worth $71.3bn.)
Klarman told the Hollywood Reporter that Fox Nation original films will focus on the military, patriotism, religious themes, holiday content and true crime, and the first entry sticks to the script (there’s a “semper fi” in the first minute). Amanda (Caitlin Clark) is a mother of two young children, a couple years out from the death of her marine husband, Jack (Patch May), “in the line of duty”. (True to form, the film gets no deeper into the real burdens of military service beyond broad platitudes of sacrifice and honor).
Amanda looks exactly like a Fox News anchor – highlighted hair in barrel curls too blond for the deep tan of her skin, ice blue eyes – and aspires to open her own small jam business, if she can clear a pesky sanitation inspection. A move to a southern coastal island reunites her with Paul (Christopher Russell), Jack’s best friend and fellow serviceman. Amanda is concerned about being a good mother to her heartbroken children and not moving too fast with Paul; both are aided by Hallmark aphorisms from Maeve (Jennifer Higgin), who assures the messages found within shells on the beach are “divine intervention”. There are numerous invocations of heaven and the people having a peaceful time there.
Nothing is particularly offensive, or surprising, or moving, and in that way The Shell Collector will probably accomplish its mission of being easy entertainment. Christianity is taken as a given rather than a mission, the resolution of what would, in real life, be a complicated, devastating situation affirms the sanctity and naturalness of the nuclear family. It’s Fox propaganda with plausible deniability, in a similar vein to Netflix’s recent controversial hit Purple Hearts, in which a “woke” liberal girl falls in love (read: changes her mind) with a conservative marine (who does not). The film, which was Netflix’s most-watched movie for the month of July, also packages pro-military sentiment and faux-centrist conservatism in a romance, though Purple Hearts aims for Gen Z and is much more overtly political.
I find it unlikely that The Shell Collector will rack up Purple Heart’s 150-plus million hours of views; Netflix is a far less politically siloed platform that Fox Nation, and The Shell Collector, as a movie, is rote and poorly acted. It is not an entertaining watch, but that does not necessarily mean it will be a failure. As a fulfillment of the Fox Nation mandate to recruit more women, it at least checks off the algorithmic boxes: romance, family, military, faith, small-town cutesiness. Watch this space.
