On Further Inspection: Lifetime Movies Suck: The Post About How Lifetime Movies Suck

Meredith Baxter Birney

Have you ever noticed how all Lifetime movies have more than one title?
Titles like "Hidden in the Open: Guilty of Love: The Sally Baker Story." I
made that one up totally on my own before going to the Lifetime Movie
listings to pick the, following plums: "Moment of Truth: Justice for Annie"
was on this morning. "Lies of the Heart: The Story of Laurie Kellogg" is
on Wednesday and "Moment of Truth: Cradle of Conspiracy," "Homeless
to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story," "Playing to Win: A Moment of Truth
Movie" are ALL on Thanksgiving Day and "Moment of Truth: Why My
Daughter?" and "Desperate Rescue: The Cathy Mahone Story" round
out the melodramatic week.

No man with a soupcon of testosterone in his body can watch this channel
for more than a few moments without officially switching teams. It isn't that
the movies are bad. They ARE bad, no doubt, it's that they are SO FUCKING
UNBELIEVABLY MELODRAMATIC. It's one thing to tell the story of a
woman who overcomes an abusive husband to improve her lot in life. It's quite
another to make sure we all get the idea of just how hideous this guy is by
making sure that not only does he hit the woman as part of the story, he does
it in front of his mistress and the children from both unions in the middle of
a dinner party just because our hero asked him he'd like any more champagne
to celebrate their 25th anniversary. Oh and he gives her herpes, too.

It's too much. Even if all of it were rooted in fact, the presentation is so lame
it doesn't matter because it just looks like really bad fiction. These movies
are just some lame-ass female revenge fantasy without even a hint of
irony in them. At least Spike (the TV channel supposedly for men) seems
to know just how stupid they really are.

The real question is how does Lifetime or Lifetime Movies do anything
remotely positive for women? At least Oxygen takes a broad approach (no
pun intended) to women's issues. The closest Lifetime comes to covering
something as important as women's health is when they did "The Rapist
Gave Me Cancer: The Veronica Hale Story: A Women's Health Issue Movie."
I made that one up, but you probably couldn't tell.

Lest I forget, so-called "men's TV" is pretty freaking horrible as well. It's so
bad, you would think the programmer's at Lifetime were honestly trying to
give men what they think men want. It's so bad, you'd think men hadn't
come up with such things as mathematics, painting, music, the space
program and philosophy. In fact, watching Spike, it's hard to believe men
don't just roll around in their own feces all day looking at boobies. But that's
another rant.