On the Set of ‘Mistletoe Murders’: Sarah Drew & Peter Mooney Preview Twists, Turns & Ho-Ho-Homicides of Season 3

Damian Holbrook November 3, 2026, 2:00 pm

Hark, hear the bells…change everything! Picking up right after last November’s cliffhanger that saw Christmas shop owner Emily Lane (Sarah Drew of Grey’s Anatomy) answering the doorbell only to find her shady ex Aaron (Aaron Ashmore), the cozy-crafty dramedy Mistletoe Murders is unwrapping some big twists in Fletcher’s Grove in Season 3 (premiering November 5).

“All of a sudden, there’s a danger zone right at her front door,” previewed Drew on the Toronto set this past July. “This really spins Emily’s life into a whole new place.” Especially since the slyly sarcastic Emily — who had been hiding her true identity and former ties to Aaron’s criminal hacker group Chimera from everyone in her Upstate New York town — had finally told cop Sam Wilner (Peter Mooney) about her past as Grace Barlow. And of course this unfolded right before the slow-burn flirts shared their first kiss. Then Aaron arrived.

Now, “the walls are closing in on her,” Drew said. “Even though she’s told Sam ‘no more secrets,’ she has another secret. You’ll see twists and turns in the romance that are very juicy.”

“His spidey sense, the alarm bells go off, but I think it’s something that he has to try and navigate,” offered Mooney. “Sam is aware that there are professional secrets, [so he’s] sort of trusting that she’s shared with him everything she can, that it’s not that she’s holding something back, just that there are things that she isn’t able to open up about. It’s not about her concealing it, it’s just about what she can and can’t talk about.”

That level of trust between their characters is something both actors enjoy, particularly because it dodges the usual trope of the cop coming to the rescue of a damsel in distress. “It’s so nice to play that dynamic as Sam,” noted Mooney. “I think the core of their attraction to each other is that they recognize likenesses and that there are similarities in each other.”

He continued, “I think it makes for a much more interesting relationship because instead of him constantly trying to stand in front of her in a dangerous situation or whatever, they come into this thing as two peers side by side. Sam can just trust that she can handle herself.”

Not just handle herself but anyone who steps to her. And we’ll see how she got so tough courtesy of “a bunch of flashbacks” to her days not only with Chimera, Drew revealed. After giving us a peek at her action-hero abilities last season, the comically gifted leading lady gets to really lean into Emily’s “badassery, which I always love to do. It’s like whenever you can give me more badassery, please give it to me,” she enthused with a grin. “I want to feel like [Alias‘] Sydney Bristow, obviously.”

It won’t just be her Chimera training, either. Season 3 is filling in the blanks between Grace’s arrest and her time behind the counter of Under the Mistletoe. “We get to see a bit more CIA Grace,” teased Drew. “And the big explosion that we saw at the beginning of Season 1? We’ll get a little more insight into what happened there this season.”

“She was offered to be removed from prison to come help them find Aaron and we’ll find out in Episode 1 that she did take that offer,” explained creator and showrunner Ken Cuperus, who has adapted his multi-volume Audible book series with wife and fellow EP Melanson. “So when we’re seeing her in the flashbacks, we’re seeing her years at the intelligence agency.”

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Walking around the Toronto soundstages, decked out in more Hallmark merch than you’d find in one of their Gold Crown stores and enough cold-weather decor to make one forget that the city was a blazing 98 degrees outside, it’s clear that the show is gearing up to expand its scope to fit both more complex storylines and more troubled drama. There are new sets, intriguing additions to the cast (more on that in a sec!) and, as Cuperus put it, a looming threat to the central Emily-Sam romance.

“Every season has sort of a conceit to it,” he stated. “Season 1 was that she was a mysterious person in a new town, Season 2 was that we were starting to learn her backstory and starting to rebuild her relationship with Sam, and then in Season 3, we’re tearing that all down again with her realizing that she has to go back to the Agency and give up her life here and what that is going to do to the two of them.”

“That’s kind of what we’re driving for this season. And that’s exactly my plan from the start,” Cuperus admitted. “I have a five-season plan. We certainly can go beyond five seasons, but I have the first five seasons mapped out.”

Hallmark's Countdown to Christmas 2026 Schedule Is Here

So what does that mean for the beloved Nancy Drew of Fletcher’s Grove? Cuperus confirmed that “we’ll find out at the end of the first episode that Emily has been told she can sort of wrap up her time there over the holidays and then she’s due to move [away] to start her new life.”

Before Em gets to packing up the shop, however, she has a holiday season loaded with cases to close. Along the way, we’ll also see guest appearances by Hallmark queens Catherine Bell (The Good Witch) and Holly Robinson Peete, a Christmas Chairman tragedy, a local who thinks they’re Santa, and plenty more ho-ho-homicides to keep Sam and amateur sleuth Emily working with (and wooing) each other.

“Every time they get to be in crime-solving mode, it’s flirtatious,” Drew pointed out. “That is their courtship, actually. Their dates are crime scenes!”

Mistletoe Murders, Season 3 Premiere, Thursday, November 5, 8/7c, Hallmark Channel