"Ah, Lifetime... the channel for women who hate men."
"My favorite channel is the Lifetime channel because Lifetime is 'Television for women. Lifetime, television for women.' Yet for some reason, there's always a woman getting beaten on that network. 'On the next Lifetime Original, Meredith Baxter-Birney gets beaten with a rod. It's a Lifetime Original Rod."
-- Jim Gaffigan
Lifetime's specialty tends to the
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, nearly always at the hands of some ghastly male. Expect the
angst to be turned up to eleven.
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 might as well be wearing horns and a tail, as they almost never help or believe the woman, and always are the cause of the mess she's in. 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 anti-male, 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 young boys are depicted as sexual predators unless they are "the good boy" who's friends with the "good girl."
Tropes present in the numerous Lifetime Original Movies:
Straight examples:
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.
