Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special, Apple TV+, review: utterly ludicrous, totally spectacular

Mariah Carey isn’t just the fairy on the top of our collective Christmas tree. She’s the branches and the trinkets, the pine needles that turn up in your carpet in the middle of July. Hell, she’s probably the stump, though she’d probably be insulted if you told her that. Carey is a festive obsessive, living and breathing the holiday’s tinsel-strewn extravagance, the maximalism that’s just the right side of tacky. So much so that Christmas seems to begin and end with her, the season only truly kicking off when Mariah Carey says it does.

Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special, now streaming on Apple TV+, is the latest bit of festive branding for the star, on the heels of a series of Christmas concert tours in recent years, and an animated Christmas film in 2017. Wrapped around all of the above is Carey’s festive anthem All I Want for Christmas is You, a bonafide classic long enveloped in the fabric of the holiday season. No one escapes its jingly caterwauling each winter, and only grinches will have a problem with that.

It serves as the glitzy encore to Carey’s Apple TV+ special, and its trademark swooniness is surprisingly the most subtle thing about this cavalcade of camp. Carey is quite literally depicted as the holy salvation of Christmas 2020 here, with a stressed elf (comedian Billy Eichner) summoning the singer/songwriter to spread festive joy to the depressed masses.

“It’s been a horrible year,” says a Zoomed-in Bette Midler, in one of a handful of increasingly surreal celebrity cameos. “I’ve tie-dyed everything I own, and I’m still feeling sad,” adds Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown. Before you can say “dodgy green screen”, Carey is whisked off on a sleigh across the night sky to sing and dance at the centre of the North Pole. Or, more truthfully, to teeter around in a series of skin-tight ensembles, as if Betty Boop had ordered everything from the Ann Summers Christmas catalogue.

Carey is spectacular. She wafts through the special mirage, crooning wistfully beneath the Northern Lights and demonstrating a masterclass in stiff line readings. For the most part, this is a promotional exercise, Carey spinning through a number of remixed Christmas standards and original songs that make up the track listing of her new CD. But what a parade of glitter, all the same.

Highlights include a triumphant collaboration with Ariana Grande and Jennifer Hudson, which culminates in some ear-splitting harmonising between Carey and Grande’s rival whistle-notes. There’s also a bizarre remix of Here Comes Santa Claus featuring Jermaine Dupri and Snoop Dogg, the latter appearing dressed in a mercilessly skinny Santa suit presumably ripped off the shopping-centre Father Christmas you were terrified of when you were three.

It’s all wonderfully maddening, Carey throwing herself into a 43-minute bombardment of cheese and grandeur that seems to transcend badness. By the time she delivers an inspirational speech about finding joy at the end of what has been a dreadful year, the viewer has been so submerged in her own personal Santa’s Grotto that you almost believe her.

Carey has form with sourcing winter cheer in moments of misery. In her recent memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey, the star wrote about the origins of her love of Christmas. She recalled the traumas of her youth, with her mother a volatile presence in the family home and her older siblings at one another’s throats. On Christmas Day, they would try and set aside their respective anguish for at least a few hours. When they didn’t, Carey “would sit there in the centre of chaos, crying and wishing … wishing I could be somewhere safe and merry – somewhere that felt like Christmas”.

“My wishing was more powerful than their pain,” she continues. “I wished with exuberance. I set about creating my own little magical, merry world of Christmas … My imaginary Christmas was filled with Santa Claus, reindeer, snowmen, and all the bells and trimmings a little girl’s dream could hold.”

Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special is that childhood dream come to life. There’s even a character dubbed “Little Mimi”, modelled after the young Carey, whose emergence from sorrow and into joy serves as a minor subplot here. Minor because this is very much the Carey show, awash in the zany showmanship that has always made her such a singular spectacle. This is a brief yet ludicrously expensive extravaganza that insists you enjoy it. And just like hearing All I Want for Christmas Is You at the tail end of November, and thinking it’s far too soon but tapping your foot anyway, you can’t help but give in.

Watch Mariah Carey's Magical Christmas Special on Apple TV+ now