Cranky Lesbian

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Valerie Bertinelli Fights Homophobia in Two Mothers for Zachary

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On April 5, 2025

In TV Movies

Valerie Bertinelli’s Two Mothers for Zachary is a hair-raising tale of institutionalized homophobia.

Every TV movie titan’s filmography is a testament to her pluck and perseverance, and few were pluckier than the great Valerie Bertinelli. By the mid-1990s, in accordance with the bloodhound rule — so named for Thelma Ritter’s “What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end” scene in All About Eve — she had boldly confronted gambling addiction (The Seduction of Gina); misogyny within the Catholic Church (Shattered Vows); and a Battle of the Network Stars monkey bar challenge, among other social ills. In Two Mothers for Zachary, she tackled two of her biggest challenges yet: fighting institutionalized homophobia and sharing the screen with Vanessa Redgrave (Second Serve), whose unfashionable orange bowl cut was perhaps a misguided tribute to Bertinelli’s original TV mom, Bonnie Franklin.

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Millicent Dillon, Jane Bowles, and the Mystery of “Lady Frances” [Updated]

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On February 2, 2025

In Books

Note: If you’ve been patiently waiting for my next TV movie post, I apologize for returning tonight with something bookish instead. Between the Parkinson’s stuff, which isn’t going well, and the recent death of a close friend, I’ve not felt funny enough to review — or emotionally resilient enough to endure — another Cheryl Ladd movie. But I’ll be back soon, with Suzanne Somers, Victoria Principal, and Lisa Whelchel titles among those on my to-do list.

A few weeks ago, while searching my inbox for something unrelated, I was reminded of a 2013 email exchange with Millicent Dillon, the physicist-turned-author and biographer of both Jane and Paul Bowles, a lavender literary power couple for the ages.* That was the summer my ex commandeered my new Kindle for its wi-fi connection, which allowed her to stay up all night devouring Dillon’s A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles through the Internet Archive’s Open Library. 

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Parkinson’s: A Year Later

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On June 18, 2024

In Brainpan

You may have noticed I’ve been AWOL lately, but I’ll return with more TV movie reviews this summer. Earlier this month I planned to write a post about the ways in which my life has — and hasn’t — changed since being diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s disease last June. The anniversary of that date came and went, lost in the shuffle of everyday life, including some YOPD nonsense that’s been taking up a lot of my time these days. I might as well address some of it now.

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Firefighter: Nancy McKeon Turns a Hose on Sexism

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On April 6, 2024

In TV Movies

Nancy McKeon keeps her eye on the ball in Firefighter.

Somewhere in the annals of TV movie history, there’s probably a biopic with less dramatic frisson than Firefighter — maybe an early ’90s TNT original called Not Without My Dry Cleaning, starring Delta Burke as a desperate tourist who enlists the help of the American Embassy to liberate her captive chiffon blouses after misplacing the receipt. But I’m hard-pressed to think of one that takes as compelling a story as Cindy Fralick’s bid to become L.A. County’s first female firefighter and reduces it to yuk-yuk suspense over whether its heroine will ever learn to cook.

Nancy McKeon (Strange Voices), who plays Fralick, appeared in Afterschool Specials grittier than this (Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom and Schoolboy Father), but it’s easy to imagine that in 1986, only three years after its subject made history, a realistic depiction of the harassment faced by women in male-dominated fields was verboten. Instead, Mod Squad director Robert Michael Lewis and screenwriter Kathryn Montgomery (herself the co-author of two CBS Schoolbreak Specials) gave viewers and fire department spokespeople alike exactly they wanted: a kumbaya tale in which even the worst-behaved men aren’t that bad, and are handily outnumbered anyway by those who root for her success.

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When the Vows Break: Patty Duke’s Fight for Justice

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On March 19, 2024

In TV Movies

Patty Duke and Art Hindle in When the Vows Break.

When she wasn’t crash-dieting or beating her son, Patty Duke partook, as so many actors did, in the time-honored TV movie tradition of crusading for justice. She challenged everything from unsafe schools (The Violation of Sarah McDavid) to the FDA (Fight for Life), while also making time to repeatedly solve her children’s murders (A Killer Among Friends and A Matter of Justice). As Barbara Parker in 1995’s When the Vows Break (also known as Courting Justice), her target is not her estranged husband — she already knows he’s a putz — but the morally compromised jurist presiding over their divorce.

Judge Wendell Adams (Robin Gammell, face fixed in a perma-scowl) opposes divorce so zealously in his family courtroom that he denies a petition based “on insufficient grounds,” arguing that marriage does not require love. Though Barbara and Art (The Silence of Adultery’s Art Hindle) started dating as teens and she worked alongside him as they built a multimillion-dollar construction fortune, she is awarded only 2% of their marital assets. She’s also granted alimony that’s unsecured and subject to revision on the whims of both Art — a financial abuser and obfuscator whose money is his only means of control — and Adams, a clear misogynist.

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Black Death: Kate Jackson Fights the Plague

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On March 1, 2024

In TV Movies

Kate Jackson and Jeffrey Nordling in a scene from Black Death.

Imagine if Charlie dispatched his Angels to defeat pneumonic plague: Jill would’ve made out with it to create a diversion while Sabrina and Kelly broke into a locked medicine cabinet under cover of night to retrieve a cache of critical antibiotics like streptomycin. Then they’d sneak up on the plague, there might be a karate-chop or two and a couple of hokey one-liners after force-feeding it medication, and we’d cut to Charlie chuckling “Good work, Angels! That Yersinia pestis never saw you coming.”

Kate Jackson has a tougher time protecting the populace in Black Death (1992, also known as Quiet Killer), assisted not by comely crossing guards but an underfunded New York City Department of Health. As Dr. Nora Hart, the agency’s chief epidemiologist, her gal Friday is Dr. Jake Prescott (Jeffrey Nordling), a fresh-off-the-bus Indiana transplant whose corn-fed naïveté makes no sense in the context of his occupation: epidemiologists tend to be pretty well-versed in the gritty realities of urban living.

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Baby for Sale: Dana Delany Child-Shops on eBay

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On February 27, 2024

In TV Movies

Dana Delany’s a tough mother in Lifetime’s Baby for Sale.

The problems start when Nathalie Johnson (Dana Delany), desperate to adopt, goes online without parental supervision. It’s 2004, and while you could engage in human trafficking on Craigslist and Backpage then, Target didn’t yet offer BOGO sales on human infants.* Dejected after another fruitless meeting with an expectant mother, Nathalie searches for ‘adoption’ and clicks the first result. She impulsively submits an application that requires financial disclosure and is soon offered Gitta, a four-month-old from Budapest.

Surgeon husband Steve (Hart Bochner) and their adoption lawyer, Kathy (Ellen David, exuding Roma Maffia energy), urge caution. They’re based in Minnesota and the baby broker, Gábor Szabó (Bruce Ramsay) — not to be confused with the guitarist — is in New York. “I have no way to properly screen him,” Kathy warns. “This is a man we know nothing about. There’s a lot of risk here.” The red flags only multiply once the Johnsons travel to meet Gitta, but Nathalie, already a stepmother to Steve’s son, is blinded by her desire for a child to call her own.

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Valentine Magic on Love Island Offers ’70s TV Nostalgia Galore

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On February 14, 2024

In TV Movies

Adrienne Barbeau and Janis Paige in Valentine Magic on Love Island.

Cheesier than a 32 oz. Velveeta loaf, Valentine Magic on Love Island (1980) was a trifle intended to entertain not only parents but the children they’d conceived while rolling around on shag carpets to Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. Combining the worst of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island — director Earl Bellamy (Flood!) was a veteran of both — it opens with grating tropical theme music even more hilariously horrible than Cloris Leachman’s Someone I Touched ballad.

As we’re introduced to a slew of characters bound for the mysterious island — one wins a paid trip, another is written a Love Island prescription by his doctor, and so on — we’re reminded of 1974’s Death Cruise. In that ABC Movie of the Week, featuring luminaries such as Tom Bosley, Kate Jackson and Celeste Holm, tourists were picked off by an assassin aboard a massive cruise ship. Much to our disappointment, no one is murdered on Love Island.

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Passions: Lindsay Wagner and Joanne Woodward Brawl at a Funeral

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On February 7, 2024

In TV Movies

Joanne Woodward rumbles with Lindsay Wagner in Passions.

There’s a quiet dignity to the way Joanne Woodward instigates a catfight with Lindsay Wagner at her straying husband’s funeral in Passions (1984). Catherine Kennerly, her patrician homemaker, doesn’t want to engage in fisticuffs, but what else is she to do when Wagner’s Nina Simon, the other woman, has the temerity to attend his church service and dab her eyes in front of God and everyone? Confronting Nina in private, a seething Catherine exclaims “You are filth!” — and still her rival persists, asserting her right to be there.

“I think you’d better leave before you make a fool of yourself,” the younger woman coolly replies. Having silently choked on her anger throughout the priest’s eulogy (“He was that rare individual who really cared about his fellow men, and acted upon his feelings”), Catherine is thrilled to have a living target for her rage. Then Nina drops a bombshell: she was with Richard (Richard Crenna) for eight years, and they have a six-year-old son together. The widow launches herself at the stylish marital interloper almost automatically, propelled as much by grief as fury.

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With a Vengeance: Melissa Gilbert’s Memorable Amnesia Thriller

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On January 31, 2024

In TV Movies

Melissa Gilbert and Matthew Lawrence in With a Vengeance.

If there’s a sensitive ’80s sitcom dad you never expected would chase Little House on the Prairie’s Half-Pint through the woods with a bloody knife and murder in his eyes, it’s probably Steven Keaton of Family Ties. (Give Jason Seaver a little coke or booze and who knows what he’s capable of doing.) That element of surprise lends a subversive jolt to the opening scenes of With a Vengeance, a 1992 TV movie also known as Undesirable, when Frank Tanner (Michael Gross) frenziedly slashes a Washington mother and her children to death and sets off after Melissa Gilbert, the only witness to the crime.

Six years later, she’s living in California as Jenna King, a nanny who breaks down when her newest employer, Mike Barcetti (Jack Scalia, Sweet Deception), questions her phony background. She admits to living under an assumed name and tearfully confesses “I don’t know where I went to high school. I don’t know if I went to high school. I don’t know where my family is. I don’t know if I have a family. The truth is, I don’t even know who I am.” Luckily for her, he’s not just a ruggedly handsome single father but a tenacious DOJ attorney determined to help cure her amnesia and uncover her true identity.

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