YMMV / Lifetime

• Audience-Alienating Era: For fans of scripted shows like Devious Maids and Witches of East End, or those that disliked the network's reality programming, the cancellation of those shows and renewed focus on "movies of the week" was the start of one in the late 2010s.
• Complete Monster:
  • Daughter for Sale: John Gallant, along with his assistant Chelsea, are vile Human Traffickers who abduct runaway girls and auction them off to wealthy men. Abducting Carly O'Neil, they keep her in line by threatening her friend Jenny, only to murder Jenny anyways in spite of Carly's compliance. When Carly's mother Annalise begins to dig too deep, John has her assaulted and robbed, and then tries to kill her himself when she interferes with the attempted ship off.
  • Hunt for the Labyrinth Killer: Daedalus—true identity seemingly upstanding Judge Gale Anderson—is a depraved killer who hunts cheating wives and subjects them to a deadly maze for fun and has over 30 victims to his name. Daedalus glories in killing people and trains apprentices to continue his legacy who he has no issue getting rid of when they're no longer of use. Intentionally getting captured to bask in beating the police after Gale's unwitting daughter frees him, he then captures her and tries to gas her. Planning to have her killed as part of his masterpiece in his ultimate quest to be an infamous killer, he mocks her by revealing he murdered her mother.
  • I Almost Married a Serial Killer: Rafael Dupont is a sociopathic killer who enjoys seducing women into loving him before gutting them. Having killed 8 women before this and kept trophies of his victims, he sets his eyes on heroine Camille. Stopped by her, Rafael then uses plastic surgery to re-infiltrate her life and seduces and attempt to kill her again, even leveraging the life of Camille's daughter if she won't submit to him.
  • The Wrong Friend: Chris Andrews is a sociopathic teenager with a penchant for violence and rape. After brutally raping Lisa, he is forced to switch schools where he immediately sets his sights on Riley, the daughter of the nurse who reported his rape. After charming Riley and inviting her to a party he's throwing, he drugs her drink and sexually assaults her while she's passed out. When Matt and Riley leave his house Chris beats himself up and frames Matt for the assault. When Kimberly finds out about Lisa, Chris viciously attacks her, beating her to the point she's hospitalized. He breaks into Riley's home, threatening to slit her mother's throat, stating that he plans to rape Riley again and again in front of her mother before killing both her and her mother.
• Older Than They Think: There seems to be a pattern for scandalous Real Life stories that goes "Ripped from the Headlines Lifetime Movie of the Week, followed by bigger-budget account of the same story on a more prestigious platform."
  • Lifetime's Escaping the NXIVM Cult: A Mother's Fight to Save Her Daughter was followed by two higher-profile documentaries: HBO's The Vow (2020) and Starz' Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult, all depicting the story of Catherine Oxenberg and her daughter India.
  • New York Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell was followed by Showtime's Escape at Dannemora.^note Which are also connected by having been written by the Tolkin brothers—Stephen wrote New York Prison Break, Michael wrote Escape at Dannemora.
  • The College Admissions Scandal (a somewhat fictionalized account of the case) was followed by Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal on Netflix.
  • The Gypsy Rose Blanchard/Dee Dee Blanchard murder case went the unusual route of Lifetime opting to do a Roman à Clef movie about it (Love You to Death, where they were changed to Esme and Camile Stoller, with Marcia Gay Harden as the mother Camile), while Hulu did the fully dramatized The Act, with Patricia Arquette winning an Emmy as Dee Dee.
  • The story of Massachusetts teen Michelle Carter getting charged with manslaughter for encouraging her boyfriend's 2014 suicide got the full trifecta—Lifetime movie (2018's Conrad & Michelle: If Words Could Kill, with Bella Thorne as Carter), a two-part HBO documentary the next year (I Love You, Now Die), and a limited series on Hulu in 2022 (The Girl From Plainville, with Elle Fanning as Carter).^note Stephen Tolkin also wrote the Lifetime college admissions and Michelle Carter movies.
• Overshadowed by Controversy:
  • When the movie Birthmother's Betrayal debuted in 2020, an advocacy group for birthmothers of adopted children launched a petition to stop it from airing, claiming that it "portrays birthmothers as dangerous and unbalanced women who are mentally unbalanced and unpredictable," even though it hadn't aired yet. Once it did, they quietly backed off because the birthmother was actually one of the heroes, and the "dangerous and unbalanced" villain was the birthmother's Evil Twin. What makes this really odd is that a movie Lifetime debuted earlier in the year, Psycho Party Planner, did play the "dangerous and unbalanced birthmother shows up to claim her child" storyline straight, with no complaints (though the villain being the birthmother was a last act Reveal).
  • A similar incident happened in 2021 with the release of Beware of the Midwife, which saw petitions being released deriding the movie for its negative/fear-mongering depiction of Black midwifery and Black birth in general. The fact that it was released during Black Maternal Health Week only added fuel to the fire. Like with Birthmother's Betrayal, the backlash quietly died out after the movie's release. Ironically, Black maternal mortality rates are mentioned within the film itself and established as the heroine's motivation for wanting a homebirth via a midwife as opposed to a hospital birth.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Recently some of the production companies that provide Lifetime with movies have produced movies in the Lifetime house style, but released them on different platforms, like Netflix. In particular, MarVista Entertainment was bought out by Fox in 2021, and they've started to produce Lifetime-y original movies for Tubi (also owned by Fox), like Deadly Cheer Mom.
  • The Perfect Bride, a 1991 USA Network Made-for-TV Movie from director Terrence O'Hara, starring Kelly Preston as a woman trying to stop her brother's Fourth-Date Marriage to a Black Widow, has not only become a Lifetime favorite, but the channel has since debuted two movies (2017's A Wedding to Die For, 2022's Here Kills the Bride) that are clearly Serial Numbers Filed Off remakes of it. The publicity material for Here Kills the Bride actually flat-out says it was "Inspired by… the Highly Acclaimed Thriller The Perfect Bride".
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Some Lifetime movie heroines end up in this category despite being the characters we're supposed to root for, usually by either being either insufferable know-it-alls or frustratingly dense. Also many cases of a character intended to be a Mama Bear unintentionally coming across as a My Beloved Smother example.
  • Kaley, the heroine of Cheating for Your Life. She's a very academically-focused girl, but only scores in the 1200s on the SAT, while a bunch of the school's party-hardy rich kids get over 1400. While she uncovers a cheating ring and corruption on the part of the test proctor, much of Kaley's motivation for digging into the matter is clearly based in jealousy, an entitled attitude, and the snobbish assumption that students who don't do well in school couldn't possibly get high standardized test scores ("gifted underachievers" who are smart but have problems functioning in a classroom environment quite often do well on those exams).
• Win Back the Crowd: Lifetime earned critical acclaim for their documentary series, Surviving R. Kelly; almost a rarity for the network responsible for Dance Moms.

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