Hallmark’s New Movie Has An Unexpected Southern Connection

As the summer winds to an unofficial close this Labor Day weekend, Hallmark is celebrating the end of the season with one final flick in their Summer Nights line up. Catch of the Day tells the story of Sophie (Emilie Ullerup), a chef on the rise in New York City who loses her dad and has to return home to Montauk to help her sister with the family restaurant. She runs into her high school crush, Cam (Michael Rady) who is also back home running his family’s small business, and well, of course a romantic connection begins to take bloom.

While this movie may be set on Long Island, it has a very unique Southern connection. Katie Lee Biegel is a fixture on our TV screens, normally seen on Saturday mornings over on the Food Network as a co-host of The Kitchen. But it turns out she’s been flexing her muscles in other areas of entertainment lately. Catch of the Day will mark her screenwriting debut.

“I wrote a novel back in 2011.That became a Hallmark movie in 2022 called Groundswell. It starred Lacey Chabert, and shortly after the movie aired, I was trying to think of ideas because I enjoyed that process so much. While I didn’t write the movie, I did get to be involved. I produced it  and I had a small role in it playing myself. I got the itch for it. I want to do this again,” Biegel told Southern Living.

An idea did come to her, after reading an article in the New York Times about the town she now calls home. The West Virginia native lives in Montauk with her husband and daughter. She told us, “when I first moved out here, [Montauk] was a commercial fishing town. In the summertime people would go on vacation there but it was very chill. Very calm. And now it’s turned into this very cool kid place with a lot of clubs. A lot of those people that made the town so special, their businesses are being pushed out. So the article was about millennials that are moving home to take over their family businesses so that they could prevent that from happening [and] so that they wouldn’t sell out to developers.”

She continued, “it got me thinking about those small businesses and about small towns all over America. Especially small vacation towns where that typically happens. And I thought about restaurant businesses…  I’m so passionate about where we live. I love the east end of Long Island. I love the small town feel and it’s really important to me that that survives. Because the more that can’t afford to live here and the more that people can’t afford to keep their businesses then we lose that specialness.”

That is where her spark of a storyline came from but she knew she couldn’t just sit down and write a screenplay immediately. Biegel took a screenwriting course at NYU to learn the basics and continued to research on her own. When the idea for her story began to get traction, Hallmark paired her with one of their veteran writers, Andrea Canning (whose name you might recognize as she also has a day job in TV as an anchor on Dateline). “ I think we came up with a great script,” she said.

The Kitchen host does also have an on-screen role in Catch of the Day, but this time she’s playing a character, and not herself.

But since the main character is a chef, Biegel also was very hands on when it came to the food. “All the way from writing those bits to try and make it as authentic as possible. I talked to my friends who worked in those fancy New York City restaurant kitchens to try and get things the right way. I researched the ingredients that would be used in those kitchens and then when it came time to film the movie, we went through different food stylists and culinary producers so we could get the right look.”

Sophie makes several recipes in the movie that are actually from Biegel’s cookbooks. “The Cioppino, the spaghetti with clams, those are my recipes,” she divulged.

Catch of the Day premieres on Hallmark Channel on Saturday, August 30, at 8pm/7 central.

Congratulations, Katie Lee!

Read the original article on Southern Living