‘The Way Home’ Creators Spill on Deleted Scenes & Movie Possibilities

Hallmark/Heavy "The Way Home" has deleted scenes.

As fans of Hallmark’s “The Way Home” eagerly await season 3, there’s been growing curiosity about the scenes left on the cutting room floor. In panel discussions at the ATX TV Festival, the creators and cast revealed that some very important scenes couldn’t make it into the final cuts that aired on TV.

Showrunners Heather Conkie and Alexandra Clarke, co-creator Marly Reed, and cast members Chyler Leigh (Kat), Evan Williams (Elliot), and Sadie Laflamme-Snow (Alice) led a cast and creators panel on June 2, moderated by Emily Longeretta of Variety. Clarke and Conkie also led a limited-attendance micro panel on June 1 that Longeretta moderated. Heavy attended both events and wrote a series of articles about what happened.

Some Episodes Were Originally More than 70 Minutes Long

During a micro-panel at the ATX TV Festival, Conkie and Clarke, the mother-daughter duo behind the show, opened up about the challenging editing process.

“In the end, we look at the show together, and we do another edit,” Conkie explained. “And usually, that edit is brutal because it’s to bring it down to time. Some of our initial shows are like 50 minutes long, and they have to be 42… Getting a 70-minute ripped down to 42 minutes, it’s just brutal.”

The showrunners and cast also talked about these deleted scenes during the second panel on June 2. The dance party scene with Elliot, Kat, Monica and Nick was much longer initially, for example. In fact, a lot of the cut scenes involved going deeper into the stories of the side characters.

Williams jokingly shared that if fans want longer scenes, they’ll need to get more people to watch.

“I do want to say that our writers have a huge task in writing a show that not only takes place with a whole bunch of characters, but also takes place in multiple timelines,” Williams said. “And … it’s a one-hour episode with commercials, so they have … 42 minutes? … [Some episodes are] coming in at like 75 minutes long… In order to be able to get to a lot of the really juicy characters, they would have to be shooting and writing for a two-hour show… The only way that’s going to happen is if the ad sales are big enough. So basically, you got to go tell your friends to catch the show if you want to see [more of] the background characters…”

During the micro panel on June 1, Longeretta asked if there was ever a scene in particular that the showrunners either really wanted to cut or disagreed about cutting.

“There’s been a few for sure…” Conkie said.

She added that usually, one of the best places to cut is near the beginning of an episode, because they may take a little too long to get to the action.

They Don’t Have the Budget for Extended Versions of the Episodes

The potential for a director’s cut or extended versions of episodes is something the creators have considered. The showrunners revealed this after a fan asked during the micro panel about the possibility of longer cuts being shared on streaming networks, kind of like Hallmark did with “Three Wise Men & a Baby.”

“We’ve often thought about that,” Clarke said. “The cuts … do live. There’s a producer’s version, there’s a network version, and then there’s the locked that goes to TV… So they do exist. There are a lot of cutscenes that I think people would love to see… There’s some really great ones that ended up on the cutting room floor that I still think about…”

“They’re very sad memories,” Conkie agreed.

But putting out a longer version of each episode wouldn’t really be possible.

“We don’t really have the budget to do two versions (for TV versus streaming,)” Conkie continued. “If we did … the whole soundtrack would be different, the music would be different, the length of the songs would be different. But it would be wonderful to have a world like that.”

The Showrunners Would Love to Make a Movie

In the first panel, the showrunners were also asked about the possibility of making a movie for “The Way Home” one day.

“I don’t think I’d want to compete with the Hallmark Christmas,” Conkie said. “They are so specific and so wonderful. They are such a brand. (But) I would love to do a two-hour movie.”

“We’ve talked about, I think, maybe a New Year’s era rather than Christmas,” Clarke added. “I don’t know. It could be kind of cool.”

During the second panel on June 2, a fan asked again about the potential for a movie. Conkie was even more enthusiastic this time, responding: “We would love to do a movie at some point. That would be amazing. And a spin-off.”

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