It’s been a four-year plunge into family fantasy

Surveying the twisty history of “The Way Home,” Andie MacDowell offered an understatement.
“This was a reach for Hallmark,” she said.
And then some. The show — starting its fourth and final season on the Hallmark Channel — has time-travel and a magic pond. Hallmark doesn’t even have a card for that.
But here “Way Home” (shown here) is, at 9 p.m. Sundays, starting April 19.This season, it even has Del (MacDowell) jump back a century, to the 1920s.
“We gave her a bit of a vacation,” series co-creator Heather Conkie told the Television Critics Association. “She got to wear some beautiful clothes and hang out with a character that you will find to be effervescent.”
But at its core, this still fits the network. It has MacDowell, who starred in Hallmark’s first drama series (“Cedar Cove”) and some of its movies. And it has favorite themes. “It is still a multi-generational family, which is what Hallmark does so well,” said co-creator Alexandra Clarke.
The show started with that: Kat (Chyler Leigh, familiar to both Hallmark and “Grey’s Anatomy” viewers) reluctantly returned to Del (her mother) and the family farm.
Ali, Kat’s teen daughter, grumbled about this. Then she found a pond that could take her back in time, even befriending her mom as a teen.
This has been complicated turf for Sadie Laflamme-Snow (shown here), now 26, who plays Ali. “It was clearest the first season,” she said, “’cause you’re only keeping track of one season’s time travel.”
For many fantasy/science-fiction shows, this would lead to elaborate explanations “We’re not a sci-fi show,” producer Marly Reed said, and there’s no big reveal coming. “It would kill some of the magic.”
Instead, the show sticks to its basics. “We have a very obvious reason we’re so interested in mothers and daughters,” Conkie said. That’s because she and Clarke are a mother-daughter team.
For most of her career, Conkie has written sweet-spirited Canadian family shows. She was writing the first scripts for “Avonlea,” back in 1990, and many of the scripts for the 17-year run of “Heartland,” which ended in 2023.
In particular, Clarke recalls “Fast Forward,” a 1995 series about two 13-year-old friends. “I watched her write those scripts … when I was that age, and I was invested in that.”
A decade later, she saw her mom step into fantasy with “Dark Oracle,” about two 15-year-olds who stepped into a comic book’s world.
Clarke worked on the final seven years of “Heartland,” as a writer and executive story editor. Meanwhile, the mother-daughter duo began creating “The Way Home” as a proposed Netflix series.
In 2021, Hallmark hired Lisa Hamilton Daly to run its programming. “She left Netflix and kind of brought us with her,” Clarke said.
During Daly’s four-year stay, Hallmark would keep its tone, but expand its range. It had fresh settings, multi-movie stories … and this step into fantasy.
“She was very adamant about it staying the same tone as we’d already developed it at Netflix,” Clarke said. “We didn’t change a thing.”
In 2025, Hallmark eliminated Daly’s job. It also decided this would be the final “Way Home” season; Clarke says the writers were ready for that. “Every season, we’ve gotta write an ending that’s a cliffhanger and we’ve gotta write an ending that’s an ending.”
This time, it will be an ending. The season will spend more time visiting the past of Kat’s love interest, Elliott. It will visit new eras. And the pond — with no sci-fi-type explanation –will remain magical.