How far is too far in television and entertainment? There’s great debate over violence and other explicit content in general media, but sometimes the line being crossed is not as obvious as nudity or bloodshed. Lifetime Network is notorious for its quickly made productions, churning out dozens of TV movies loosely based in fact and filled with salacious hyperbole.
Their most recent winning program, The Pregnancy Pact, featured a story similar to the truth-life group of Gloucester girls eager to have children at the same time, and in high school no less. Weaving the plot in and out of fantasy and reality, Lifetime presented the highly fictionalized version of events with real news footage of the town’s mayor and staff handling the situation as they did months earlier. This kind of style lent the otherwise fabricated story a great deal of credibility, leaving the small New England town scrambling to defend the very values, schooling and parenting called into question over primetime.
This is just one example of a Lifetime movie that, all production value and poor writing qualms aside, not only causes undue notoriety but exploits a personal tragedy in an individual’s life.
Sunday evening, Lifetime plans to do it all again with their newest and arguably most controversial made-for-TV-movie Amish Grace. The “film” covers the senseless and horrific massacre of five Amish girls in their own schoolhouse and the community backlash that followed.
The project is loosely based on the similarly titled book, “Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy,” but the writers declined to work with producers on the proposed adaptation from the get-go. Their publisher sold the rights to their book to Lifetime, and the authors announced their desire to donate all personal profits to charity.
It is projects like this one that bolster Lifetime’s Nielsen ratings. Certainly some of the more infamous and highly anticipated movies lend to a greater draw in audience, perhaps curious to see “the whole truth.” But the stories presented in these rough dramatizations are crude representations of fact, wrought with salacious twists, scandals and exaggeration.
Network executives say audiences can’t get enough “based on a true story” style programming. It seems people flock to watch someone else’s life fall to pieces, either for the inspirational aspect, or the twisted satisfaction of schadenfreude.
This concept in television is not original to Lifetime movies alone. Plenty of reality programming has the same appeal to audiences, showing the real life breakdowns of truly desperate individuals. Law &’ Order is infamous for ripping episode plots from headlines. The show constantly pushes the boundaries of “too soon” with its portrayals of celebrity deaths (like the young blond bombshell overdose airing weeks after Anna Nicole Smith’s passing) and often upsetting some real life crime victims (like Ravi Batra, a lawyer who in 2004 sued the show for libel).
These examples are just a few of the thousands of programs dedicated to revved-up, almost true to life stories. Whatever the reason to watch is, one thing is for sure: as long as people are watching, this kind of programming will keep coming out.
Amish Grace will air this Sunday at 8pm on Lifetime…but please watch something better like The Pacific on HBO.
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