Day #7: The final film in our Mother’s Day marathon is The Truth About Jane (2000), a Lifetime ditty about the inability of mother Janice (Stockard Channing) to accept the lesbianism of her teenage daughter Jane (Ellen Muth). Costarring James Naughton and RuPaul, The Truth About Jane contains many scenes set at a dining room table. Each and every time, without fail, I thought of late comedian Bob Smith’s Thanksgiving joke (“Please pass the gravy to a homosexual”) and laughed.
Day #6: Motherhood was often at the center of Rue McClanahan’s TV movies, whether she was in a starring or supporting role. We still have a few of those titles left to tackle, but today’s retrospective is of her most frustrating portrayal of motherhood: Baby of the Bride. The middle entry in her early ’90s Margret Hix series finds her unexpectedly pregnant at 53, and boy is her husband a rat about it.
Day #5: For today’s new review we’re looking back on My Mother’s Secret Life, a tawdry 1984 telefilm starring Amanda Wyss as a teenager in search of her birth mom following the death of her father. It brings her to the doorstep of a glamorous San Francisco call girl played by Loni Anderson. This was my greatest surprise of the week. It’s thoroughly ridiculous and that’s why it works in spite of itself.
Day #4: Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? is the mother of all TV movie questions, and today we’ll look back at that film, which was reviewed here last year. This one should be extra special to gay viewers not just because of the title and Tori Spelling (or costar Ivan Sergei, of The Opposite of Sex), but because the titular mother was played by the marvelous Lisa Banes. Banes, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident last year, was survived by her wife.
Day #3: We have a new review today, of Sins of the Mother. In this nasty little 1991 adaptation of a true crime book, Elizabeth Montgomery plays a manipulative mother unaware of her son’s violent secret life—and the role her abuse has played in it. Montgomery was one of the earliest (and busiest) queens of the TV movie, and later this year I’ll write about more of her work.
Day #2: Today we’re revisiting Mother Knows Best. We first watched this 1997 black comedy in January and were surprised by its hilarity. Joanna Kerns plays against type as the mother-in-law from hell, a socialite who consults a hitman when her daughter (Christine Elise) mortifies her by marrying a blue collar man (Grant Show).
Day #1: It’s May 2nd and our first post, a look at the 1981 Afterschool Special Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom, is live!
Mark your calendars! Unless my dog eats my computer, we’ll kick off a one-week celebration of Mother’s Day on May 2nd. Every day through the 8th we’ll feature a TV movie about motherhood, blending all-new content with some reposts of other mom-centric reviews.
It’s a rehearsal for a more ambitious project I might undertake later this year, so we’ll see how it goes. It’s definitely not kid-tested or mother-approved, but you can get in the mood ahead of time by listening to Lucille Bluth sing “Rose’s Turn.”
Beginning on the 2nd, I’ll “sticky” this post and update it daily with the appropriate link, and of course you can also subscribe to the site below (or track updates via RSS) if you’re a masochist.
