Dateless to Dangerous: My Son's Secret Life (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 21) my husband Charles came home from work relatively early and joined me for the last hour and a half of a two-hour Lifetime TV movie I’d been particularly looking forward to: Dateless to Dangerous: My Son’s Secret Life. The reason I was especially interested in this one is I had just finished reading Dale Boren’s amazing book It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office, which made the argument that Trump won in 2016 (and arguably in 2024 as well, though Boren’s book is from 2019 and therefore came before Trump’s spectacular return to power) largely on the strength of disaffected young men who faced a world of either unemployment or ultra-low-paying jobs after going into hock on their student loans, and who sat in their mothers’ basements and logged on to Web sites and social-media pages that reinforced each other’s prejudices that life just sucks. Boren argued that Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential candidacy briefly lit an idealistic flame among at least some of the Internet denizens, but when Obama governed as a moderate Democrat instead of the revolutionary change figure he’d sold himself as, the Internet “bros” first went back into lethargy and then were snapped back into political awareness by the rise of Donald Trump. Boren argued that Trump satisfied the hunger of a lot of young white American men who were tired of being told they were the privileged ones and they had to bend over backwards to accommodate the demands of women and people of color, when they were all too aware that their own lives were hardly bastions of privilege.

Consciously or unconsciously, Trump’s brazen contempt for “political correctness” and “wokeism” in general, and for women and people of color in particular, hooked a large voting bloc of disaffected young men on Internet social platforms in general and Twitter in particular and helped propel him to the Presidency. It also, Boren argued, moved the politics of the Internet “bros” firmly and enduringly to the Right. Alas, the people who made Dateless to Dangerous, director Stefan Brogren and writers Edmund and Gary Entin, used only the most superficial aspects of this reality and shoehorned it into the typical Lifetime formulae, though they did one thing that was genuinely creative. The story centers around the Miller family, mother Noelle (Jodie Sweetin), son Miles (Alexander Elliot), and daughter Haley (Nikki Roumel). The genuinely creative aspect was what the writers did with Noelle’s husband: instead of either still being around the family or definitively divorced or dead, they made him a globe-trotter (at one point he calls Noelle from Bali) who keeps hitting the family’s bank account to fund his travels – leaving Noelle in a continuing state of anxiety over whether she’ll be able to pay the bills – and eventually hooks up with a typical bimbo girlfriend whom we see only in pics the kids have found on social media. Miles is the older of the two Miller kids and he demands that his mom let him spend a lot of time alone in dad’s man-cave basement, where he plays a lot of video games and soon joins chats that reinforce his growing sexist prejudices against all women.

The film takes place during homecoming week at “Greenview Valley High School” in Illinois (just where in Illinois isn’t specified), when Miles’s two attempts to get a date, with Sophia Nazer (Alexandra Chaves) and his partner on the debate club, Beatrice (Shechinah Mpumlwana), both end in rejection and frustration. (It’s significant that the two women who reject Miles are both people of color.) Meanwhile Miles also gets jealous of the growing attraction of his sister Haley to Sam (Kolton Stewart), who’s racially ambiguous (he mostly presents as white but his flat nose and nappy hair give him at least a hint of Blackness) and, when he says he doesn’t celebrate Christmas, slyly lets us know he’s Jewish. Miles starts identifying himself as an “incel” (short for “involuntary celibate”), and at one point he throws Sam out of their house for seeing Haley after the two got it on at a drunken party (featuring the invariable index for underage drinking on a Lifetime movie, red Dixie cups) and breaks Sam’s arm in two places. Miles’s Internet “friends” are giving him the same typical advice on “How to Pick Up Girls” that circulated in nasty books from the 1950’s and 1960’s that basically told horny young straight guys that the only way to get women to have sex with them is by intimidating and/or bribing them – and for someone like Miles who doesn’t have the money or possessions to bribe them, intimidation is the only way to go. In an attempt to build sympathy, Miles belts himself in the face with a dumbbell on the advice of one of his Internet “friends.”

Beatrice demands a new debate partner and the team’s coach, Avi Kumara (Husein Madhavji) – whom, it’s hinted, is interested romantically and/or sexually in Miles’s mother Noelle – agrees. Miles walks out of the debate team and descends into Internet-fueled madness so completely that he decides to get his revenge (again, egged on by text messages from his online “friends”) by getting his father’s gun out of storage, grabbing a jerry-can full of gasoline, and torching the big homecoming party. What he’s going to do with the gun isn’t all that clear: at first he seems headed for massacring all the students who’ve given him such a hard time (at least in his own mind), though in the end after he sets the debate team’s homecoming float on fire he rushes off to a tunnel, Haley catches up with him, and he decides to shoot himself. Miles and Haley Both Reach for the Gun (oh, say a prayer to Maurine Dallas Watkins, original author of Chicago!) and for one brief horrible moment we think that Miles has accidentally killed his sister. Fortunately, the two both survive, and there’s a typical Lifetime “Six Months Later” chyron in which Miles is in some kind of custodial facility where he’s finally getting the professional help he needed all along even though all his life plans are in ruins now.

I’ve often commented that the existence of “incels” makes me sorry that people can’t consciously change their sexual orientations through sheer force of will, because judging from the photos of “incels” I’ve seen, maybe they can’t find women who’d want them but they’d do pretty well in a Gay bar. Alexander Elliot is actually, if not drop-dead gorgeous, at least easy on the eyes, and it’s readily apparent to see how he got the idea from his weirdly gynocentric home life and the absence of his father (at one point dad calls – we don’t ever see him except in two photos with his bimbo, but we at least hear his call to Miles – and Miles pleads to be allowed to live with him instead of mom when his parents finally get their divorce, but dad’s answer is a hard no) that women rule the world with their power to say yea or nay to men who want to have sex with them. It’s an interesting movie that does what it set out to do pretty well, but it could have been a lot deeper and richer if the Entin brothers who wrote the script had been more aware and alive to the potentialities of their subject matter.