The Babysitter's Double Life (Storyteller Studios, Studio TF1 America, Blackstar, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 22) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime which I’d seen listed on their Web site and whose titles had intrigued me: The Babysitter’s Double Life and Her Husband’s Double Life. The Babysitter’s Double Life was directed by Lisa France from a script by Ashley O’Neil and was so close to the previous Lifetime film Babysitter’s Black Book (2015), directed by Lee Friedlander from a script by Richard Kletter and Michele Samit, it almost counted as a remake (and Lifetime did France and O’Neil no favors by re-running Babysitter’s Black Book just before The Babysitter’s Double Life). The central character of The Babysitter’s Double Life is Lia Collins (Courtney Fulk), who’s a senior at the prestigious (and expensive) Rossmore College whose business professor, Rosen (Josie Davis), is pressing her to come up with a plan for a startup as part of the class assignment. Lia hits on the idea of running a combination babysitter and “companionship” service for single parents who are lonely without their exes around. Lia is already working as a babysitter for Ethan Harlan (Cole Gerdes) and being paid in cash (two $100 bills for each night she works) when suddenly her scholarship to Rossmore is revoked because she failed to disclose her babysitting income on her application. So she’s desperate to make more money to stay in school and pay off the back tuition Rossmore is billing her for, and to do that she puts her combination babysitting/companionship business in operation. Ethan offers to back her financially and give her advice, and in a scene that’s quite chilling he gives her a Rolex watch and then she yields to his seduction in a nicely done soft-core porn scene. The makers of The Babysitter’s Double Life made the same mistake that the makers of Babysitter’s Black Book and Lifetime’s other movies around this premise have: they make the men who the teenage girls end up prostituting themselves to so genuinely attractive one gets the impression they’d want to have sex with them even without being paid to do so.

Lia recruits various nubile classmates of hers, including her Black best friend Kenzie (Kennie Nicole) and Tessa Holloway (Sophie Teasell), whom Lia assigns to Ethan’s best friend Greg (Brock Vickers). Kenzie righteously refuses to have sex with her clients but others in Lia’s posse, including Tessa, agree to do so in exchange for bigger payouts – which Lia accepts on a don’t-ask don’t-tell basis and keeps a second set of books in which to account them. One of the ways Ethan tricked Lia into having sex with him is by telling her he was going through a “trial separation” from his wife Annabelle (Katie Dallas), and Ethan’s kids have genuinely bonded with Lia. Unfortunately for Lia, Ethan is lying in more ways than one; not only are he and Annabelle still very much a couple, but Ethan is not filthy rich as he’s claimed. In fact, he owes $7 million in debt to various creditors, and Lia catches on when her supposedly expensive Swiss watch stops working. She looks it up online and discovers that if it stops working that soon, it’s a fake. Ethan tells her he deliberately palmed off a fake watch on her because she hadn’t yet “earned” a real one, but that causes Lia to do a clandestine search of Ethan’s business records and she discovers all the dunning letters he’s getting from his creditors. Lia also discovers the videos Ethan has filmed of his previous babysitters, all of whom he’s seduced and all of whom look strikingly like Lia. She tries to copy them onto a flash drive so she’ll have evidence against Ethan, but Ethan gets an alert on his own phone from a different location that an unknown device has logged on to his computer. Ethan immediately begins deleting his video files faster than Lia can copy them.

There’s another plot strand involving Lia’s friend Tessa, who mysteriously disappears right after a date with Greg. Tessa had previously called Lia and asked not to be assigned to Greg again on the ground that Greg was becoming dangerously obsessed with her, but Ethan assured Lia that he’d talk to Greg and ensure that nothing untoward happened to Tessa. Only Greg and Tessa got into a fight, Greg accidentally killed her, and dumped first her car and then her body. Lia finds the car with the help of her age-peer boyfriend Jace (the genuinely cute if not drop-dead gorgeous Drake Piscione), who’s worked out his own startup involving setting up security cameras to track the location of animals in semi-urban areas so they don’t become roadkill. But it’s not until an unrelated hiker discovers Tessa’s body in the park where Greg dumped her that the whole plot unravels. Ethan morphs from just a horny rich (or presumably rich) scumbag into a full-fledged Lifetime villain, while Lia hooks up with Annabelle, who fortunately made copies of all Ethan’s incriminating videos and saved them to a flash drive of her own. Ethan attempts to kill Lia but fortunately she’s saved by Jace and the police, who arrest him. (I was expecting – and fearing – an ending in which the young women get nailed while the men go scot-free, which is how it usually works in real life, but fortunately Ashley O’Neil didn’t go there.) I was amused at the ads shown during this film for subscriptions to Lifetime’s “streaming” service, the Lifetime Movie Network (LMN), which advertised the movies as being “as unpredictable as life itself.” That struck me as odd because a major part of the appeal of Lifetime movies is their utter predictability, the sense you have while watching them that you’re ahead of the filmmakers at every plot turn, and even when they try to throw in a “surprise” twist, it’s from a very shallow well of plot devices and clichés and you’ll still be able to predict just where this plot is going.