Lust, Lies and Polygamy (Hybrid LLC, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 10) my husband Charles and I put on two Lifetime movies, Lust, Lies and Polygamy and The Paramedic Who Stalked Me – the second of which sounded like a title made up by someone just to ridicule Lifetime movies. I had assumed Lust, Lies and Polygamy would be about a Fundamentalist Mormon cult and its leader’s obsession with collecting wives the way people used to collect Green Stamps, but no-o-o-o-o. It’s about a woman named Ellen Clark (Alicia S. Mason) who married traveling salesman Paul Clark (Tremayne Norris, who isn’t as drop-dead gorgeous as some of Lifetime’s male villains but who has a joyously wonderful pair of pecs and is shown topless enough we get to appreciate them) after her previous husband died. Paul’s carefully constructed scheme to have a separate family with another woman unravels when Carl Hoff (Ryan Stroud) shows up unannounced at Ellen’s home while Paul is away. Ellen thinks he’s a prowler and calls the police to have him arrested, and instead of shooting him on sight as one might have expected given that Carl and all other principals in this movie are Black (yes, this is the “race movie” sub-genre in the Lifetime formula), the police take him into custody. Later Ellen gets a call from Paul telling her that the police had to release Carl because they didn’t have enough evidence to hold him. Only it turns out later, after Ellen talks to police detective Holland (Memphis Cade), yet another hot-looking Black actor in the dramatis personae, that the real reason the police didn’t hold Carl is because Paul refused to press charges. Later we find out the real reason: not only is Paul sexually involved with Carl’s ex-wife Grace (April Hale), and has gone through a sham “marriage” with her and is co-parenting her two teenage sons from Carl, but Carl blames Paul for the breakup of his marriage and hates him for that reason.

With the aid of her best friend Cindy (Malynda Hale), Ellen finally figures out just what Paul has been doing on those so-called “business trips” – including giving Grace an engagement ring actually made by Ellen as part of her home-based handcrafted jewelry business, a bit of chutzpah rare in the script by the usual Hybrid/Lifetime writing team of Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Adam Rockoff (Amy Barrett was the director and she did the best she could with what the writers gave her). Ellen has a teenage daughter named Kelsey – who for some reason uses the last name “Clark” even though it’s the name of the stepfather she can’t stand (she’d be much more likely still to use the name of her deceased real dad) – who resists Paul’s attempts to parent her, though when Paul’s deceptions are unraveled Kelsey admits to Ellen that she did not see through Paul’s imposture but she never liked him simply because he tried to come on like her father, and she did the you’re-not-my-dad number on him. It all comes to a climax in a scene in which Paul threatens Kelsey with a taser Cindy had given Ellen and Paul was able to grab – by this time Ellen has filed for divorce and changed the locks on the house (thereby frustrating Kelsey, who comes home from school one day and is understandably flummoxed when her key no longer works) but Paul still seems able to get in, and the writers ripped off the famous twist from Sleeping with the Enemy of having Paul obsess about the “proper” layout of her kitchen accessories (here it’s a spice rack instead of a shelf of canned goods, but the principle is the same). She’s tossed out the carefully arranged spices in the rack but she knows Paul is back in the house when the spice rack reappears in the place, and in the format, on which he’d insisted.

Ellen finally calls the police on Paul, but he gets away without being arrested and in the final scene he’s cruising another woman in a bar and the writers are strongly hinting she’s going to be his next victim (and quite likely are setting us up for a sequel). I don’t care for these open-ended Lifetime endings – I want to see the bad guy either arrested or killed – and overall Lust, Lies and Polygamy is pretty unspectacular; the writers make a half-hearted attempt to have Paul justify his actions by telling Ellen “men have different needs” and his “needs” are too expansive to be satisfied by just one wife (he does tell Ellen that she’s a better cook than Grace), but he’s not a charismatic enough personality to intrigue us nor a sufficiently nasty villain to disgust us. He’s just there.