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Tag: Family Drama Page 3 of 6

Betrayed: A Story of Three Women Finds Meredith Baxter in a Murder-Free Infidelity Saga

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On April 21, 2023

In TV Movies

Swoosie Kurtz and Meredith Baxter won’t be smiling for long.

A little bit of lesbianism would’ve gone a long way in Betrayed: A Story of Three Women (1995), its heartache perhaps averted if only Swoosie Kurtz and Meredith Baxter had found love with each other, and not unreliable men, back in college. Our cad here, the dashing Rob (John Terry, whose other woman was a man in Change of Heart), belongs to Amanda Nelson (Baxter), who is best friends with Joan Bixler (Kurtz). And if you think the widowed Joan is upset when daughter Dana (Clare Carey of Coach) drops out of law school, just wait until she catches her in a compromising position with Rob.

“You’re referring to yourself and Rob as ‘we’? You two are a ‘we’ now? Oh, I think you had better rethink that little pronoun,” she rants to her daughter, who took afternoon naps in the Nelsons’ marital bed as a tyke. “‘We’ is in your imagination. ‘We’ is not even a possibility.” Before leaving in disgust, she hands her an old family photo, showing an adult Rob beside Dana, then a child. “It’s almost incest,” Amanda says of the affair, a sentiment neither viewers nor Joan disagree with, but it wouldn’t be a betrayal without blow-ups and breakdowns and even a good face-slapping (administered by Amanda to Joan in a grocery store parking lot) along the way.

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House of Versace, Starring Cristal Connors

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On April 18, 2023

In TV Movies

“I’m doin’ some of the finest cocaine in the world, darlin’. You want some?”

The genius of Lifetime’s House of Versace (2013) is most evident in its casting: Gina Gershon, Cristal Connors herself, stars as Donatella Versace (or is that Versayce?). It’s a choice that instantly conjures memories of Showgirls, setting the mood for glorious camp to follow. Gershon more than delivers the goods as a grieving sister who is 80% cocaine and 20% synthetic hair, rasping lines like “A hooker wouldn’t even wear this shoe!” and “Giving up my heels was harder than giving up cocaine” as naturally as Carmen Maura interprets Almodóvar.

In the movie’s first act, Donatella and brother Gianni (Enrico Colantoni, of the unfortunately titled fashion sitcom Just Shoot Me) frequently squabble like children, to the irritation of their more placid brother Santo (Colm Feore). “You both exhaust me,” he tells Gianni after the pair stage another spectacular workplace meltdown. When they inevitably kiss and make up, he complains “You two deserve each other.” Gianni is a doting brother and uncle (you’ve not heard “principessa!” so many times in one film since Life is Beautiful), but he’s not above telling his sister “I’m the sun and you’re the moon and your job is to reflect my glow.” Nor is she above hurling homophobic insults at him.

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For the Love of Nancy: Tracey Gold’s Anorexia Movie

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On April 16, 2023

In TV Movies

Tracey Gold in a scene from For the Love of Nancy.

A hazard of the message movie is that disparate audiences can take very different lessons from it. My wife was already anorexic by the time she arrived in middle school, where one of her teachers played For the Love of Nancy on videocassette during free periods, presumably in an attempt to reach at-risk students. She recalled this recently after spotting the DVD on my desk. “Did you learn anything from it or were you hostile to its message?” I asked, suspecting I already knew the answer. A sheepish smile tugged at her lips after a moment’s reflection: “I learned you can hide food in walls,” she replied with a laugh.

That is most assuredly not the wisdom screenwriters Nigel and Carol Evan McKeand sought to impart with Nancy, about a family’s struggle to save its daughter from an eating disorder. But what they hoped to accomplish wasn’t entirely clear to me, either. We never get close enough to 18-year-old Nancy Walsh (Tracey Gold) to understand who she was prior to her illness, and even once she’s in the throes of it, we watch the terrible proceedings from a curious emotional remove. Then there’s the brazenness of Gold’s casting itself. She was still early in her own recovery from anorexia in 1994, which raises uncomfortable questions viewers must answer for themselves about responsibility and sensationalism.

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Park Overall Calculates The Price of a Broken Heart

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On April 5, 2023

In TV Movies

Park Overall in The Price of a Broken Heart.

Like Park Overall in The Price of a Broken Heart (1999), I would be stunned if my husband cheated—mostly because I don’t have one. But if you were to traffic in heterosexist stereotypes, as Lifetime movies do, my wife is essentially an old-school husband. Society views her as the more dominant and valuable partner because of her career; I’m the one who does her laundry.

How would I react if she ran off with her secretary? Well, I’d be surprised, mostly because she lacks the requisite immaturity, free time and organizational skills for such pursuits. (“Can you pls wash my lacy black bra and book a hotel room for my affair tomorrow? Thx,” she might text me before an assignation.) One thing I’m confident I wouldn’t do is sue her mistress, the course of action Overall’s Dot Hutelmyer charts in The Price of a Broken Heart, a sort of tawdry primetime domestic spin on The Price is Right.

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Murder is Genetic (and Campy) in Tainted Blood

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On March 26, 2023

In TV Movies

Raquel Welch butches it up in Tainted Blood.

In Arsenic and Old Lace, Cary Grant’s character famously quips “You see, insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.” Tainted Blood, a 1993 made-for-TV thriller starring the tiniest bits of Raquel Welch and Joan Van Ark’s original faces, takes that premise and stigmatizes it within an inch of its life—it would make you cry uncle, if you weren’t afraid that he, too, would show up and go on a killing spree.

Welch, inexpressive as ever in a series of drably colored power suits, plays Elizabeth Hayes, a bestselling author of books about “the breakdown of the American family” and “prostitute spies in Washington, D.C.” We meet her as she crashes a funeral in Oklahoma, where high school athlete Brian O’Connor (John Thomson) shot his parents and then himself in a crime that left their small town reeling. Her instincts for tabloid journalism are rewarded when Brian’s grieving aunt (Molly McClure) reveals her adopted nephew was born in a psychiatric hospital.

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Because Mommy Works: The Nightmare of Having a Self-Sufficient Mother

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On January 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Anne Archer is a persecuted parent in Because Mommy Works.

From Stella Dallas to Kramer vs. Kramer, there’s no tearjerker quite like the separation of parent and child, and Because Mommy Works (1994) is no exception. An NBC production that found a second home on Lifetime, it could more accurately be called Because Daddy’s a Dipsh*t. And while its plot and resolution are likely to astonish or even amuse younger or more sheltered viewers who don’t take it seriously, the ’90s were indeed still a time when mothers, unlike fathers, were legally penalized for working or attaining higher education.

Anne Archer plays Abby Forman, a cardiac care nurse and mother to six-year-old Willie (Casey Wurzbach of Gramps). Her ex-husband, Ted (John Heard, a specialist of sorts in detestable characters), has spent nearly half of Willie’s life largely absent from it, doing whatever he pleases, but believes he has fulfilled his fatherly obligations by never missing a child support payment. Now remarried to homemaker Claire (Ashley Crow, who makes the most of a small but complex role), he reappears to again hassle Abby for having the temerity to think that she, like him or any other working father, can effectively parent while also holding a job.

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A Soapy Sister Act in Dick Van Dyke’s Daughters of Privilege

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On January 20, 2023

In TV Movies

Dick Van Dyke stares into the ruins of his past in Daughters of Privilege.

Soapy, swampy and occasionally sultry, Daughters of Privilege (1991) is above all else fairly silly, even though its star, Dick Van Dyke, doesn’t trip over any ottomans—or, for the Golden Girls aficionados among us, practice law while wearing a clown suit. As Buddy Keys, a hard-headed businessman whose empire includes construction, real estate and newspaper publishing, there are secrets in his eyes and wisdom in his mustache, little of it shared with either us or his plentiful daughters.

From his first marriage to Trina (Marj Dusay), a treacherous social climber, he is father (or “Daddy,” as they call him) to crusading physician Mary Hope (Daphne Ashbrook) and rebellious Diana (Kate Vernon). He shares young newspaperwoman Felicia (Angela Alvarado) with an unseen second wife from whom he’s estranged. “A kid who doesn’t depress me!” he proudly calls Felicia. When she pronounces his newspaper boring, he is invigorated even as he chides her: “Why don’t you just speak your mind? Why don’t you show up here after 25 years of court-enforced visitation and tell me how to run my business?” And then he makes her an associate publisher.

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Jaclyn Smith Believes in Santa in The Night They Saved Christmas

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On December 9, 2022

In TV Movies

Jaclyn Smith with her brood in The Night They Saved Christmas.

There is no greater ’80s holiday fantasy movie than A Smoky Mountain Christmas (1986), with its savory squirrel stew blend of witchcraft, fairy tales, backwoods orphans, country music stardom and poisoned maybe-lesbian pies. But once you’ve completed your annual viewing of that Dolly Parton classic, you might consider checking out The Night They Saved Christmas (1984), another family-oriented telefilm that will leave you staring at the screen in confusion, murmuring “What the jingle hell is this?”

Nearly as bad as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, it essentially hinges on whether an oil company will slaughter Santa and his elves (who number in the thousands) for a shot at greater riches. But there’s so much more to it than that, nearly all of it bleak and depressing. The Night They Saved Christmas doesn’t only inspire ’80s nostalgia because of its sophisticated robot toys, parents on the verge of divorce, fashionable winter jumpers and references to Saudi involvement in American oil. It’s also a heartwarming reminder of our constant proximity to ruthless annihilation in the waning years of the Cold War.

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Leave Holiday Baggage on the Luggage Carousel

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On November 30, 2022

In TV Movies

Cheryl Ladd tends to Barry Bostwick in Holiday Baggage.

Inspirational only on the basis of its sprawling incoherence, Holiday Baggage is a film so invested in the idea of reconciliation that it doesn’t bother to evaluate why, or even if, its family should stay together. Trading jingle bells for warning bells as early as its opening credits—when director Stephen Polk’s name appears at least five times within 90 seconds—this is a festive tale that makes you wish divorce decrees could be stuffed in Christmas stockings alongside candy canes and Bonne Bell Lip Smackers.

Irrepressible scoundrel Pete Murphy (Barry Bostwick), a pilot, charted a course away from his family a decade ago, preferring flings with flight attendants in tropical locales to life with pediatrician Sarah (Cheryl Ladd) and their children in Chicago. Newly retired and eager to remarry, he is finally ready to formalize his divorce from Sarah, who agrees on the condition he reconcile with their daughters. That is easier said than done, partly because Pete has gone to such great lengths to insulate himself from the consequences of his actions that his body rejects the very concept of personal accountability.

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I Think I’m Having a Baby: A Teen’s Pregnant Pause

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On October 3, 2022

In TV Movies

Jennifer Jason Leigh, dressed in a red shirt, waves.
Jennifer Jason Leigh waves goodbye to her childhood in I Think I’m Having a Baby.

As strange a title as it is — it’s preferable to possess a degree of certainty about whether you’re expecting — I Think I’m Having a Baby is also perfectly in keeping with the utter cluelessness of this 1981 Afternoon Playhouse special’s 15-year-old protagonist. Laurie McIntire (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a child with the hair and makeup of a divorced and disillusioned single mother of two, has entered that hideous phase of adolescence where she’s constitutionally incapable of doing anything but mooning over an unimpressive boy.

Star athlete Peter (Shawn Stevens) dates her older cousin Phoebe (Helen Hunt), whose preppy sweater draped over the shoulders tells you all there is to know about her. Peter isn’t particularly bright (Phoebe does his schoolwork) and teases Laurie on the rare occasion he notices her at all. But when her best friend Marsha (Bobbi Block, now known as Samantha Paris) and little sister Carrie (Tracey Gold, years away from the torments of Lady Killer and Midwest Obsession) mock his ape-like walk across the football field, Laurie gets defensive. “He’s not really like that,” she insists.

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