There are endless ways to confront the pedestrian stressors and ennui many of us face as we hurtle toward middle age. Sports cars and extramarital affairs are usually the self-treatments of choice for forty-something family men in TV movies (rarer breeds make dirty phone calls), but Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction entices us with a hit of something different. In this 1983 offering that plays like an Afterschool Special for quadragenarians, Dennis Weaver escapes his professional and familial pressures by sniffin’ the devil’s dandruff.
Take a deep breath and prepare to clutch your pearls, because you will not believe what Jean Smart’s handsome doctor husband is up to in the 1998 Lifetime movie Change of Heart. I’ll give you a hint: it involves long-buried feelings and a penis not his own. This will be a long one (no pun intended) since gay made-for-TV movies were still quite a novelty in the ’90s.
Jennie Garth will not be ignored in An Unfinished Affair.
Here we go again with Tim Matheson and adultery. Having learned nothing from all the rampant infidelity that claimed no fewer than three lives in The Woman Who Sinned, his Alex Connor in An Unfinished Affair (1996) didn’t just mess around on any wife, he cheated on a woman dying of cancer. His biggest mistake is also his greatest joy: she miraculously, as he calls it, recovered.
“I know I need to put on some more weight, but at least I didn’t lose my hair,” Cynthia (Leigh Taylor-Young) sheepishly tells him during one of their scenes of domestic idyll. He couldn’t be happier to have his wife back and has even decided to give up a teaching side gig to rededicate himself to marriage. Pleased, Cynthia admits, “I know it’s selfish but I want you all to myself.”
Tim Matheson is keeping some painful secrets from Leigh Taylor-Young in An Unfinished Affair.
Does it make a ton of sense why he chose to scratch the teaching itch during the time he was most convinced his wife’s death was imminent? Of course not. But this is an exceptionally lazy screenplay (credited to Rama Laurie Stanger, later of Lifetime’s House of Versace, and Dan Witt) in need of a way to introduce the other woman, Sheila Hart (Jennie Garth), a graphic designer who took his class.
Jack Wagner has dangerous abandonment issues in Lady Killer.
We might as well get this out of the way here: I consider Judith Light the Maria Falconetti of American made-for-TV movies. She is without peer. No matter the limitations (or excesses) of the material or her costars, her performances tend to be tiny marvels of subtlety, sympathy and generosity. Lady Killer (1995) is only the second of her films I’ve reviewed here, after A Strange Affair (1996), and it’s easily one of my least favorite of hers, but no matter how silly it might sound to the uninitiated, she genuinely elevates the medium.
Here she stars as Janice Mitchell, a homemaker who spends more time in the company of her therapist than with her workaholic husband Ross (Ben Masters) and co-ed daughter Sharon (Tracey Gold). Ross is usually overseas and with Sharon away at school, Janice is lonely and directionless. For fun she takes architectural tours, which is how she meets Guy Elliman (Jack Wagner), a self-described sometime architect whose voluminous hair suggests the balance of his time is spent deep conditioning.
When I think about the 1980s and its enduring cinematic celebrations of the decade’s twin passions of aerobics and bad taste, Just Between Friends, a Mary Tyler Moore vanity project from hell, outranks even Perfect. That James Bridges film, in which Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta gyrate their way to cardiovascular fitness—and love—will one day earn a post of its own, but today we probe the shameless and admittedly shallow depths of Just Between Friends.
A modest, unintentionally mortifying monument to the self-obsession of celebrity, here we have a film starring Mary Tyler Moore that was written, directed and produced—under the auspices of her MTM Productions—by Allan Burns of Mary Tyler Moore Show fame. (He also penned the Kristy McNichol vehicle Just the Way You Are.) Much of that classic sitcom’s finest humor sprang from its sly, playful framing of arrogant characters. There’s arrogance to spare in Just Between Friends, but the filmmakers don’t realize it’s their own, or that it’s funny.
