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Tag: TV Movies Page 1 of 12

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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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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Stillwatch: Lynda Carter and Angie Dickinson Collide

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On January 26, 2024

In TV Movies

Lynda Carter in Stillwatch.

Lynda Carter’s shoulder pads are so impressively broad at times in Stillwatch (1987) that she resembles David Byrne in Stop Making Sense. You might optimistically wonder if the cushioning is tactical, meant to provide protection during that most sacred of ’80s primetime rituals: a catfight. But Patricia Traymore, her TV journalist, is too refined for that. Her inevitable showdown with scheming Senator Abigail Winslow (Angie Dickinson) results in a single slap.

A profiler of celebrities and politicians, Patricia’s been lured to Washington, D.C. by veteran newsman Luther Pelham (Stuart Whitman) to interview Winslow, who’s in the running to replace an ailing vice president. “I’ve always felt that the public’s right to know ends where my private life begins,” Abigail uncooperatively maintains, even though she’s a public servant whose career was built on the premature death of her congressman husband. Naturally, there are skeletons in her closet — and a few in Patricia’s, as well.

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Lies Before Kisses: Jaclyn Smith’s Tawdry Neo-Noir

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On January 12, 2024

In TV Movies

Jaclyn Smith schemes and seduces in Lies Before Kisses.

When we think of femme fatales, we don’t usually imagine scheming seductresses in mom jeans and cutesy vests. But Jaclyn Smith (In the Arms of a Killer, The Night They Saved Christmas) remains true to her early ’90s Kmart aesthetic in Lies Before Kisses (1991), even as she rushes from one clandestine meeting to the next, leaving a trail of besotted men — and planted evidence — in her wake.

The duality of her Elaine ‘Lainey’ Sanders, wife of publishing magnate Grant (Ben Gazzara), is exposed at their daughter’s birthday party. After a catering snafu leaves them cakeless, she graciously insists “Don’t worry. If we have to, we’ll put some candles on the pâté.” Her mood darkens moments later, once she overhears Grant on the phone with a mystery woman. Rather than confront her husband, she calls the catering company to unleash hell. Lainey is used to getting her way.

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Obsessed: Shannen Doherty’s Fatal Attraction

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On January 1, 2024

In TV Movies

Shannen Doherty channels Isabelle Adjani in Obsessed.

The early ’90s were a cinematic golden age of gorgeous obsessives scheming seaside in trash, glorious trash, and while Obsessed (1992), Shannen Doherty’s entry in that sweepstakes, was made for ABC, it has the lurid spirit of a Cinemax special. Your hopes will soar from its opening scenes, when her Lorie Brindel, a marine surveyor in her early-to-mid twenties, is dispatched to appraise a yacht for insurance purposes and arrives in her finest miniskirt, appallingly baby-voiced and flirtatious with a silver-haired client, Ed Bledsoe (William Devane).

“I’ve seen a lot of boats but not many this old, in this kind of shape, Mr. Bledsoe,” she coos, impressed by the majesty of his vessel. You’re forgiven for anticipating the strains of “bom-chicka-wawa” on the soundtrack, and that’s before she admiringly runs her hand along his yacht’s woodwork as he grins like a Cheshire cat. They show some propriety by arranging a dinner date, and their first tryst — a very ’90s ordeal with excessive closeups of limbs entangled in white sheets (and Lorie reverently kissing Ed’s saggy chest) — is scored with the same saxophone music that accompanied all sex in TV movies during the Clinton administration.

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Deadly Whispers: Tony Danza’s Odd Turn as a Murderous Father

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On December 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Tony Danza and Pamela Reed in Deadly Whispers.

Imagine Tony Danza in a frilly dress and sun hat, clutching a parasol and drawling “Fiddle-dee-dee! Ashley Wilkes told me he likes to see a girl with a healthy appetite!” and you’ll have some idea of the absurdity of his casting in Deadly Whispers (1995). The extent to which he mangles an exaggerated Southern accent is hard to overstate; when he says “Yo missin’ The Waltons” (rather than “You’re missing”) only 10 minutes into the movie, you might laugh harder than you ever did at Who’s the Boss?

Unfortunately for Danza, Deadly Whispers isn’t supposed to be funny. In this thinly veiled dramatization of the 1987 murder of Kathy Bonney, he plays Virginia salvage yard owner Tom Acton, the last person to see his troubled teenage daughter Kathy (Heather Tom) alive before she disappears. A high school dropout who answers the phones at Tom’s business — he doesn’t need the help but refuses to let her out of his sight — she defiantly teases her hair and bares her midriff in pursuit of a married coworker.

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