Every now and then I find myself in the right circumstances to be watching a Lifetime movie on television, and just such a circumstance occurred this week when I was in a hotel room an hour across town for a prolonged visit to a sick family member. I was in a very uncomfortable bed, unable to sleep, and bored with my tablet games, so I took my chances on regular old cable TV. I was not disappointed. I was treated to two Lifetime movies in a row, the first which I missed a few minutes of but was quickly able to ascertain the plot, and the second which I got to watch almost the whole thing in all of its glory before I finally dozed off. There was an era when Lifetime movies were all about youthful, plucky cancer victims or sexy nannies stealing husbands, but both of these movies were strangely obsessed with social media influence on kids, so I guess that’s where the cultural zeitgeist is now. I’ll cover the first one quickly—it was a “Bad Seed” type of narrative, wherein a little girl pushes one neighbor off of a ladder and poisons another neighbor’s ice cream in order to remove them as an obstacle so she can go to Adventure Camp with her divorced dad, all at the behest of a social-media influencer she is fixated on. She ends up in some sort of sociopath-kid rehab at the end, but I doubt that she changed her ways much. I’m looking forward to the sequel.
Another extremely satisfying read!