Narration: This Tuesday on Lifetime: Valerie Bertinelli stars in a Lifetime Original Movie. Bertinelli: You know, Doctor, you said you were gonna cure my cancer, but all you did was rape me. I'm starting to think I don't have cancer at all. Doctor: Well, you're right. About the rape part. But I'm sorry, you still do
have cancer. Bertinelli: (cries)
Narration: Valerie Bertinelli in: Men Are Terrible And Will Hurt You Because This Is Lifetime.
—"Movin' Out (Brian's Song)",
Family Guy
This Thursday, Meredith Baxter Birney gets beaten with an iron rod, in a Lifetime Original: Rod...
—Jim Gaffigan
Lifetime is a cable TV channel in America. Its specialty tends to the
Poor Woman In Misery genre, and the best of them have the woman
stalked, harassed, raped, jailed, shamed, generally in some way
undergoing some tragedy to the Nth degree, always at the hands of some ghastly male. Expect the
angst to be turned up to eleven. It's like
Warhammer 40000 without the ultraviolence and
High Octane Nightmare Fuel (although the
sheer badness of these movies can be pretty scary in itself.
If they're not so bad they're utterly hilarious, that is). And of course without, you know, the fun.
If the woman
gets pregnant, it's often from
rape or incest or by some punk who either promptly runs off or takes the baby away from her. Miserable-Pregnant-Women are a whole genre in their own right, never keeping the kid for more than two minutes. Older children are even better here, as they can be counted on to scream
"MOOOOOOMMY!!" while being threatened in some nail-biting scene.
Any man in one of these pictures will be the embodiment of Evil: cruel, selfish, greedy, perverted, violent, ungrateful... Seldom will they ever have something close to a positive trait. They almost never help or believe the woman, and always are the cause of the mess she's in or will do anything to worsen her situation
just to amuse themselves. Of course,
the "poor woman" is supposed to "deserve it" by giving into the guy's intentions, whether for romance or a glamorous job or social climbing or just a quick nooky session. (Nooky is especially good for this.)
Suspense always continues until the last five minutes, when everything is ratcheted up to flashpoint, and the woman somehow bests the man by
stabbing or shooting or shoving him into (usually)
certain death, then comes the abrupt cut to the
Tacked-on Ending, sometimes
happy, sometimes Where Our Heroine
Learns Her Lesson, and
always anticlimactic. Note that despite having been betrayed by every male who's walked onto the screen for the last ninety minutes, in at least half these films the woman
still has to be saved by a man
arriving at the last minute.
Besides being somehow both anti-male and anti-feminist, the
Lifetime Movie of the Week also appears to
prey on the fears of white suburban middle aged homemakers. For instance, most younger women (or
teenagers in general) are depicted as antagonists. The younger girls are usually depicted as home wreckers or
promiscuous "bad girls" who are trying to corrupt the
"square" and squeaky clean "good girl." Most adolescent boys are depicted as sexual
predators unless they are
"the good boy" who's friends with the "good girl". Younger boys, if they're seen at all, are the
Littlest Cancer Patient whose mother must fight the system (personified by
male doctors, hospital and insurance admins) to cure her son.
A similar channel of that is Family Channel, as it has similar themes as Lifetime featuring teenage girls with bratty and jerky brothers, among all things. Granted,
that is teenage nature, but this troper can't but to think there is just this slight hint that Family Channel is a gateway show to Lifetime.
Contrast with
Hallmark Card Movie, the popular
Hallmark Hall of Fame series of
Melodramatic made for TV films which, appropriately for a greeting-card company, specialize in
Rose Tinted Narrative and
Glurge:
"X made Dancer In The Dark look like a Hallmark film."
Tropes present in the numerous Lifetime Original Movies:
- All Men Are Perverts (Every male is a horndog, don'tcha know).
- Colon Cancer (The usual formula for the titles goes something like: Verbing the Noun: The Full Name of the Battered Woman Story)
- Cut Himself Shaving (Often, The Heroine will make up idiotic excuses to cover up the bruises coming from the OMG abuse dealed to her)
- Deus Angst Machina (Okay, WHAT Horrible Bad Thing will happen NOW)
- Domestic Abuse (Almost always handled by An Evil Man)
- Double Standard (Women are portrayed as the poor defenceless victims of the evil, selfish and cruel men, even if both of them act like jackasses or morons)
- Made For TV Movie
- Melodrama
- Narm (Just check this link
)
- Rape As Drama
- Rape As Redemption (Lifetime tends to take sadistic joy in breaking promiscuous "bad girls")
- Serious Business (whatever the subject of the movie is, regardless of how "serious" it would be in real life)
- Straw Feminist / Tsundere Sue (if a woman shows an attitude, she's likely to be any of these)
- Sympathetic Sue (The female victim will often be shown as very whiny, bitchy and wangsty. And everyone will adore her instead of wanting to strangle her)
- The Unfair Sex (in spades because men can only be evil at heart in these films, no matter what they do).
- Toxic Friend Influence, expect this trope if it's dealing with underage girls.
- Wangst (also IN SPADES)
Straight examples:
- The Jennifer Lopez vehicle, Enough, is essentially a Lifetime Movie Of The Week on steroids, where the woman, after the abuse and cheating from her Complete Monster husband, breaks into her husband's house with the full intention of murdering him (she chickens out, then after more struggling he falls out a two-story window), and is still presented unerringly as the heroine.
- Between Friends is a Lifetime Movie Of The Week in comic strip form, with the Narm sucked out of it. Brings Wall Bangers by the truckloads whenever it tries to be serious, and nobody with a Y chromosome escapes unscathed. Of course, since all the allegedly "empowered" women are depicted as hyper-insecure, Does This Make Me Look Fat types who both agonize over buying the low-fat double-whipped frappucino and also pound back the cheesecake like there's no tomorrow, they don't fare too well either.
- Sally Field's movie Not Without My Daughter. FUCKING GOD. While not being made by Lifetime, it does manage to not only fit the mold perfectly, but offend
Iranians Muslims Women people with common sense non-Americans EVERYONE. This article from an Iranian professional woman says a lot.
- The Mexican shows "Mujer: Rompe el Silencio" ("Woman: Break the silence") and "Lo que callamos las mujeres" ("What us women keep for ourselves"), broadcasted by Televisa and TV Azteca respectively, are pretty much Latin-American version of Lifetime shows in a 1-hour TV series format. Stories about females in peril or distress that claim to portray what women live in modern society? Check. Men portrayed as selfish, cruel, one-dimensional, perverted and/or abusive unless they throw themselves at the Lead-Du-Jour's feet and kiss her ass? Check. Women caricaturised as weepy, whiny little victims who are Too Dumb To Live to an egregious degree? Check. Melodrama over 9000? Check...
- The predecessor of both two shows mentioned previously was the long running "Mujer: Casos de la Vida Real" ("Women: Real Life Cases") with former Mexican young actress Silvia Pinal (known to younger people as the old lady in "Mujer...")
- And continued by La Rosa de Guadalupe and Cada Quien Su Santo, transmitted by Televisa and TV Azteca respectively, which is about the same but with religion played in.
- A few episodes of Law And Order: SVU fall into this.
- One episode brutally deconstructs this when Stabler suddenly finds himself being treated as the man in this sort of drama despite doing everything he can to help the woman.
Parodies:
- Skewered by The Onion here.
- Similarly parodied by Something Awful here
- An episode of 30 Rock featured scenes from a fictional Lifetime movie which told the story of how C.C. became a congresswoman after being shot in the face by a dog. The movie was titled A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me A Better Face To Change The World: The Celeste Cunningham Story and the scene where she's shot had her dramatically gasping "I’m going to get into politics!" as she fell to the ground.
- Chainsawsuit has She Cried Veto: The Susan Miller Story (it starts here), in which Susan Miller is assaulted by the President of the United States. Money quote:
The President: My new bill will make rape the new legal currency of America.
- Sent up in American Dad':
Roger: Oh, my God, look what's on Lifetime! Daphne Zuniga in Spooning with Anger.
Steve: So?
Roger: So?! That's our favorite spousal abuse movie of all time. We gave it even higher marks than Valerie Bertinelli's classic, Please, Kevin. Not in the Face.
TV: "I'm sorry dinner was late! I love you so much!"
Roger: Why do they stay, Steve? Why do they stay?
- Her Married Lover looks like a straight example, but notice that the flashbacks tend to have more of this style than the scenes in the present? It turns out this is a Deconstruction.
- A skit on the claymation show Starveillance parodies how Lifetime movies are usually the end of the line for actresses, particularly TV actresses, with sinking careers. The skit features Mischa Barton taking a nap in a cafe shortly after her character was killed off on The OC. In her dream, she meets Michelle Rodriguez, Star Jones, and last but not least, Shannen Doherty, whose entry is accompanied by an ominous flash of lightning. They tell her that, since she left the show that made her famous, her career, much like theirs, is doomed to spiral downward, with her only career openings all being on the Lifetime channel. They point to Shelley Long, whose career was never the same after Cheers ended, and is still preparing for an audition for Shakespeare In Love, even though that movie came out years ago. The dream ends with the other actresses mobbing Mischa like zombies, chanting, "You're one of us now, Mischa!" She is finally awakened from her nightmare by her agent, who is calling her with a movie role. She is initially overjoyed to hear his voice, but after she learns that the role she's been offered is that of a young mother with cancer, she asks what channel the movie is airing on. Cue Big No.
- Saturday Night Live did a Real Trailer Fake Movie for "Lifetime's" Hello Stepson, Now Let's Go to Bed: I Went to Bed with My Stepson: The Laura Bengal Covington Story.
- In The Adventures Of Dr Mc Ninja after the ghost wizard takes over Dark Smoke Puncher he suggests that his mother might get a Lifetime movie out of their fight, entitledA Woman's Choice. A Mother's Nightmare. The alt-text goes on to say:
I think that's how I want to see the first Dr.
Mc Ninja move made. With the budget and style of a movie on Lifetime. What's that? Why yes, I will throw away life's opportunities for the sake of a joke.
- Family Guy had Brian and his girlfriend, Jillian, watching a commercial for a Lifetime movie entitled "Men Are Terrible And Will Hurt You Because This Is Lifetime".
- An earlier episode showed the family watching a programs with two women eating ice cream and making very lame jokes about men. Then it went to commercial announing that they were watching Lifetime: Television for Idiots.
