[Less people read this blog on the weekend so I have decided to use weekend posts for more silly stuff. Feel free to let me know if you think this is an awful idea.]
I have written two books in front of the television, mostly the Lifetime Movie Network and similar fare. Made for TV thrillers are just perfectly trashy, and almost always unintentionally hilarious. Also you can write in front of them because it is very easy to follow without paying much attention -- someone always comes in and recaps the whole film at some point, often right before the climax.
Today's selection on the Lifetime Movie Network:
4:26-6:13. On the Edge of Innocence. 1997. Teens flee psychiatric ward with a hostage. Starring Kellie Martin and James Marsden [CYCLOPS!].
6:13-8:00. Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear. 1998. A woman hires assassins to kill her nanny. Starring Josie Bissett.
8:00-9:45. Between Truth and Lies. 2006. A psychiatrist tries to protect her daughter from an obsessive psychopath. Starring Mariel Hemingway. [I love Mariel Hemingway, I do not care what anyone says.]
9:45-11:30. The Babysitter's Seduction. 1996. A police detective probes a case in which a baby sitter is implicated in the murder of a man's wife. Starring Stephen Collins, Keri Russell [Felicity!] and Phylicia Rashad [the mom from The Cosby Show!].
My favorite part about Lifetime Movies? That you can just interchange half the titles: You could easily switch "Baby Monitor: The Sound of Fear" with "The Babysitter's Seduction" and you could change "On the Edge of Innocence" with "Between Truth and Lies" and no one would notice.
Also, one little thing Sara noticed about Lifetime -- their new movies are called "Lifetime Movie Network Original Premieres." How many people think the sequence of starting letters "L-M-N-O-P" is intentional?
All of the ones from the 90s starred Tori Spelling.
ReplyDeletehaha..eh..that's a great idea.
ReplyDeleteThere is a comedian named Jim Gaffigan who has a bit about how Lifetime claims to be "Television for women" but it always has women being beat up on it. Ok it doens't ransfer as funny when I summarize it but it is a funny bit. I have to agree with Lauren though, the Tori Spelling ones of the 90's were awesome in some horrid train wreck kind of way.
ReplyDeleteAh, Geoff, I'm always up for more silly stuff.
ReplyDeleteAnd allow me to don my probability theorist hat to answer your question about the consecutive letters thing - given a first word, the odds of the next four words starting with consecutive letters is (1/26) ^ 4, or approximately one in 450,000. So I'm guessing it's not a coincidence. (This assumes, of course, that a word is equally likely to start with any of the 26 letters of the alphabet, which isn't true. But even allowing for that, the odds of it being a fluke are still gonna be long.)
Doffs probability theorist hat.
Exeunt.
Dan, that probability calculation ignores the fact that the network was already called Lifetime Movie Network, so those three letters were a foregone conclusion.
ReplyDeleteAnd anything original to a network is called a "[insert channel name] Original", whether it's a "Hallmark Channel Original," a "TNT Original" or an "LMN Original."
The long odds get a lot shorter in this case.
[Doffs "Proofreader for a magazine about cable TV" hat. Exit. Curtain.]
I thought it was "Lifetime Movie Network Original Programs" but whatevs.
ReplyDeletemadd: (note: I will not be quoting exactly, rather paraphrasing/trying to quote from memory) "Tonight on Lifetime, Meredith Baxter Birney gets beaten with a rod...in a Lifetime Original, 'Rod'"
Geoff: That James Marsden movie sounds a lot like the one he did with Katie Holmes, also on Lifetime this past weekend: "Disturbed." Except w/out the hostage...