Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleading Scandal (Fox Television News, Orly Adelson Productions, TVM Productions, Lifetime, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I watched last night was an oldie-but-goodie Lifetime movie called Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal, made in 2008 and with better behind-the-camera talent than usually works for Lifetime: the director was Tom O’Laughlin (who made the last Friday the 13th film for theatrical release and followed it up with a TV series on the murderous character) and the writer was Teena Booth (who doesn’t seem to have been able to break through the TV ghetto but is a quite remarkable scribe whose other credits include Drew Peterson: Untouchable, another story about a psychopath who thinks his social and sexual connections will enable him to avoid responsibility for his actions forever). Fab Five was reportedly based on a real story and deals with a group of five cheerleaders at a Texas high school (either in Houston or one of its suburbs, though the only clue we get as to where in Texas we are is a long-shot that includes the Astrodome) manage through their utter amorality and their parents’ connections (one of them is the daughter of the school’s woman principal who threatens to leave town and move back to her dad’s place in L.A. even though dad already has his hands full with a new wife and their kids -- and another has a mom who’s really good friends with most of the school board) essentially to terrorize the entire school -- fellow students, faculty and staff -- into total and abject submission.

The film’s actual heroine is Emma Carr (Jenna Dewan), who’s just been brought in to the school to take over a departed teacher’s rural geography class (at first I wondered what “rural geography” meant and how it differed from any other sort of geography, but the more I thought it the more it made sense that in a large state like Texas, which is largely agrarian even though it has at least five major cities, “rural geography” might be a specialized discipline a high school would feel it needed to teach) and also her assignment coaching the school’s cheerleading squad. Once Emma starts calling the cheerleaders together for practice she realizes what she’s up against and the probable reason her predecessor left, the titular “Fab Five”: Brooke Tippit (a marvelous bad-girl performance by Ashley Benson), Jeri Blackburn (Jessica Heap), Lisa Toledo (Aimee Fortier), Tabitha Doering (Ashlynn Ross) and Ashley (Stephanie Honore). They make it clear to Emma from the get-go that they don’t play by the same rules as the rest of the cheerleaders -- or, for that matter, of normal, non-psychopathic human beings. Indeed, in their total lack of empathy, their unconcern with the welfare of anyone but themselves, and their unwillingness to submit to anyone else’s rules they reminded me so much of Donald Trump I rather grimly joked, “Which one of them is going to be the first woman President?”

Curiously, they don’t seem all that interested in sex except to the extent that they can use it as a weapon to get other things they want: one night, when they want to score beer and none of them happen to be carrying the fake I.D.’s they’ve made (or had made) for that purpose, they stage an en masse invasion of the car of a couple of boys at the school and flop around in their laps while grabbing their beers. The Fab Five abruptly become the Fab Four when Ashley is read out of the group for making a pass at Tim (Jason Davis), a boy at the school Jeri considered “hers” even though he insisted they’d broken up well before that. Jeri sees Tim and Ashley kissing in the school parking lot (though not doing anything more than that!) and she and the other three immediately declare war on her, ultimately cornering her at the end of a school corridor and beating the shit out of her. When coach Adam Reeve (Dameon Clarke), tall, sandy-haired and lanky in the usual tradition of nice males in a Lifetime movie, comes on the bruised and battered Ashley in the hallway and asks what happened to her, she gives the classic excuse of a woman in a relationship with a physically abusive partner: “I fell.” Coach Reeve sees through it instantly and says, “The next time you ‘fall’ like that, please call me.”

Emma and the coach ultimately turn to each other for moral support against the relentless assaults on their dignity and authority by the Fabs, but naturally the Fabs in general and Brooke in particular want to make it look like Emma and the coach are having an affair, even though both are married to other people, so they can paint Emma as an immoral adultress and get her fired. They overhear Emma telling Coach Reeve, “Isn’t it time we told your wife?” (it’s actually about a major vacation Coach Reeve is planning to take his wife on during summer break, but he wants to surprise her), and later they catch Emma and Coach Reeve giving each other an emotionally supportive hug. That’s all it is, but Brooke photographs it on her cell phone and offers it as evidence to her mom, school principal Lorene Tippit (Tatum O’Neal, in case you were wondering whatever happened to her -- it’s not every Lifetime movie that boasts a performance by an Academy Award winner!). Emma finds herself summoned to the principal’s office and confronted by Lorene, the hapless vice-principal Spretnak (Keith Flippen) and Jeri’s mother, Pamela Blackburn (a nice ice-lady performance by Rhoda Griffis).

Instead of getting the Fabs either expelled from the school or at the very least kicked off the cheerleading squad so the nice, normal-human girl Megan Harper (Hailey West) can take over and run the squad as a team instead of bunch of insulated prima donnas having their way with everybody, Emma finds herself fired and goes home to lick her wounds (metaphorically) with her husband (who not surprisingly is the same tall, lanky, sandy-haired “type” as the coach she was falsely accused of having an affair with) until she hears that a TV reporter is nosing around the school investigating the cheerleading squad -- whose latest antic, crashing an adult store and filming themselves drinking and playing with the sex toys, has “gone viral” on the Internet even though social media were still in their infancy in 2008. (Facebook was just one year old and Twitter didn’t even exist yet.) Against the advice of the Black woman teacher at the high school who tipped her off to the media inquiry, Emma spills all to a woman reporter and gets the school board to appoint a “special investigator.” Thinking he’s just going to be another official who’s going to whitewash the school and its Cheerleaders from Hell, Emma goes in with a hostile attitude. But the investigator actually does a fair job and in particular focuses her ire on Lorene Tippit, telling her, “You failed in your two most important duties, as a principal and a mother.”

Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal is that rarity, a Lifetime movie with no murders and no obvious mayhem -- the worst crimes we see are assault and underage drinking -- and yet it’s one of the most thrilling and involving things I’ve ever seen on this network. Teena Booth’s script rivals Christine Conradt’s best Lifetime work in creating genuinely multidimensional characters -- we’re powerfully kept in the dark as to just What Makes Brooke Run and the relationship between her and her mom Lorene is vividly drawn. At times they seem to have reversed the usual mother-daughter dynamic; Brooke seems to have her mom so cowed it seems as if the mother is desperately seeking approval and love from her daughter instead of the other way around. Fab Five is an unusually powerful Lifetime movie precisely because it’s so understated, and yet the actors, writer Booth and director McLoughlin rise to the occasion and paint a chilling portrait of just how powerful the “Fab Five” are at this school -- and, especially relevantly for our current political times, just how much of a leg up people who are totally self-centered and supremely uninterested in the welfare or rights or well-being of anyone else get to survive and even prosper in a world like ours that exalts greed as a virtue and damns altruism and empathy as vices!