by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Next up on the Lifetime “Mommy
Madness” marathon was the week’s Saturday “premiere,” A Mother Knows Worst, a bizarre piece of melodrama from three old
Lifetime hands, writers Rebeca Hughes (that’s how imdb.com spells her first
name) and Stephen Lyons, and director Robert Malefactor — oops, I mean Malenfant.
(I’ve made that joke on his name before.) This was the closest any of these
three movies came to depicting a genuinely “mad” mother, though even in this
case Hughes and Lyons pulled a couple of surprise twists at the end that [spoiler
alert!] the mother who supposedly knew
worst was really innocent after all. Mom is Olivia Davis (Katie Leclerc), who
just happens to be giving birth to her first child while in an adjoining room
in the maternity ward another woman in the final stages of pregnancy is also
about to give birth. Her name is Brooke (Victoria Barabas) and she’s the wife
of a rich man named Glen (Todd Cahoon) who has some sort of business that has
afforded him and his wife a lavish lifestyle (complete with a house with big
bay windows — lately just about all
rich Lifetime characters have lived in houses with bay windows) but also has
left him with cash-flow problems. Brooke has had a series of miscarriages —
it’s obvious the writers are going for the irony that all their money hasn’t
been able to buy them the one thing they really want (though I would have found
myself asking — not for the last time in this movie — “Why don’t they adopt?”)
— while Olivia has never been pregnant before.
Both women give birth, attended
by a nurse named Nancy (Heather Ankeny) who has a mom named Holly (Corinne
Laurance) who’s very ill with cancer and needs quite a lot of expensive care.
Glen and Brooke go home with a healthy baby but Olivia is told by the nurse
that her own baby died minutes after being born. Glen offers Olivia’s husband
Harry (Jeff Schine, even more of a milquetoast than usual for a Lifetime
husband) a job with his company, whatever it is (or does), as a sort of
consolation prize because they had their baby and Harry and Olivia did not.
Olivia sinks into the Mother of All Post-Partum Depressions, insisting that
she’s going to keep the baby room they were preparing for their newborn
daughter and going over to Glen’s and Brooke’s every chance she gets to help
out with the baby, to which she feels a mystical connection. Olivia catches
Brooke bottle-feeding the baby, a girl whose name is Sienna (Ocean Tauber), and
launches into a lecture about how breast-feeding is healthier for both parties
— only Brooke complains that baby Sienna never “latched” on to her (I guess
that’s the actual term) and therefore she had to bottle-feed. Olivia offers to baby-sit for Glen
and Brooke any time they need her, but they say they’ve already hired a nanny
to take care of Sienna full-time while Glen and Brooke go out into the work
world and do whatever they need to do. Meanwhile, Harry (ya remember Harry? Olivia’s husband?) goes through the books of Glen’s
business and finds they’re $50,000 short, and he’s trying to figure out who
embezzled the money, how they did it and where it went. While all this is going
on someone else sneaks into Glen’s and Brooke’s house at night and kills the
nanny by giving her wine and then holding her head down in the couple’s
swimming pool. (Did I tell you they have a swimming pool? They’re affluent
characters in a Lifetime movie, aren’t they?)
Glen tells Harry he’s going to
leave Harry and another executive in charge of running his office while he goes
on a business trip to London — meaning a big promotion for Harry and a lot more
money — only someone files an anonymous sexual-harassment complaint against
Glen, he has to call off the trip to stay home and fight it, ad there goes
Harry’s promotion and extra money. Brooke finally gets so tired of Olivia
coming around and wanting to help parent Baby Sienna that she takes out a
restraining order against her, only the truth finally comes out when Harry at last figures out where the
$50,000 went (ya remember the $50,000?): it went to Nancy, the nurse at the hospital who’s been consoling
Olivia and acting like her best friend. It seems [surprise!] that Brooke’s pregnancy ended in yet another
miscarriage, and [double surprise!] Glen,
figuring that Brooke would be totally devastated and might break down
completely if she found out she’d lost yet another baby, bribed Nancy to tell
Olivia and Harry that it was their
baby who died while his and Brooke’s lived. The show ends up in a typical
Lifetime sequence in which Glen locks Harry and Olivia in his basement,
intending to kill them now that they’ve learned his secret, and to do that he
pulls a gun on them — only Brooke gets the gun away from him and threatens to
shoot him over the way he
deceived her. Eventually They Both Reach
for the Gun (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney now has a huge
Manhattan office and 35 assistants) and Glen gets himself shot as he and Brooke
are wrestling over it, while Harry and Olivia not only survive but get back
Sienna, who after all is biologically theirs. It’s decently directed by
Malenfant (as much as I like to ridicule his name, he does have a real flair for suspense and action — far more
than Jake Helgren), though I should have been able to guess how the story would
come out given that Todd Cahoon as Glen is so much hotter than Jeff Schine as
Harry: in Lifetime movies the hottest guy in the cast almost always turns out
to be the villain!
