Double Double Trouble (PF Cherry Productions, Studio TF1 America, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, February 22) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Double Double Trouble which had had its “premiere” on the network the night before but I’d bypassed it to watch the Winter Olympics. Double Double Trouble was on from 4 to 6 p.m. and, as I guessed, it was largely a rehash of the 1948 film A Stolen Life, directed by Curtis Bernhardt and starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford. Double Double Trouble was one of Lifetime’s “race movies,” essentially their usual formulae with an all- (or mostly-) Black cast. Directed by Gabriel Correa and written by Sa’Rah Jones (that odd spelling of her name is correct; her only credits, at least as referenced on moviemagg.blogspot.com, are the 2023 film Girl in the Closet, a regrettably bad reworking of a true-life case of extreme child abuse, and the three films in their Single Black Female series, which she co-wrote with Tessa Evelyn Scott), it starred Tami Roman as twin sisters Ali and Drea. Ali was the “good sister” and was born 21 seconds ahead of Drea (Charles questioned that and said most real-life twins are born a few minutes apart because the mother’s womb needs that much of a rest between births), and the film starts with Drea in the hospital after her latest attempt to give birth through artificial insemination from her husband Kevin (imdb.com’s page on this show is inadequate and lists only four actors by character name) results in a miscarriage. Drea is anxious to try again even though she’s already failed three times, but Kevin couldn’t be less interested in her; he’s found another Black woman whom he’s impregnated and is waiting for her to give birth. Later someone corners Kevin and shoots him dead, but we can’t tell whether it’s Brea, Ali, or someone else.

Ali is introduced along with Brea as co-hosts of a local cooking show called Double the Recipe which is based around the novelty of being hosted by twin sisters. The two get a meeting with an entrepreneur who wants to take the show nationwide, but only with Ali, not Brea, as the sole host. Brea is a regular at a local coffeehouse where she spots hot, sexy hunk Ryan Jackson (Colin Lawrence) and immediately decides he’s the right man for her. Unfortunately, Ryan, who in addition to being handsome is also a multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur with a company called Reverb Tech, meets Ali at a business conference and falls head over heels for her. Ryan and Ali get to have a lot of sex, and one of their trysts leads to Ali becoming pregnant – which sends Brea into a jealous hissy-fit because conception is an especially sore point for her. Brea responds by spiking Ali’s drinking water with a combination of listeriosis and E. coli, and Ali gets sick; she recovers, but her unborn baby dies. Alas for Brea, the show’s director, Lamar (who it’s hinted is Gay, which inevitably made me look longer and harder at the actor playing him), accidentally caught Brea’s poisoning of Ali on camera and threatens to report her to the police. Brea responds by knocking Lamar out in the parking lot and pushing him into the path of an oncoming car, thereby dispatching him but making it look like the proverbial “accident.” Brea steals the house key Ryan has given Ali and seduces him – he can’t tell the two apart and neither can we except that Ali wears a brighter and redder shade of lipstick, which Brea uses to disguise herself – and then tells Ali that Ryan raped her. This causes Ali to break off their relationship, though later they reconcile after Ali realizes that Ryan is blameless.

It ends in a confrontation at Ryan’s home in the mountains by a lake, in which Brea goes after Ali with a knife, Ali goes after Brea with a gun (left there in a case, which Ali extracts and then is too nervous to load properly, so there’s only one bullet in it), and during their confrontation [spoiler alert!] Ali admits to Brea that she killed Brea’s late husband Kevin (ya remember Kevin?) to help Brea get over him. (That confounded my expectations because I’d thought the story would end with Brea conveniently dead, Ryan and Ali getting together, and Ali getting that great new nationwide cooking show which she could host solo.) The movie ends with Ali dead and Brea taking her place in Ryan’s arms (and bed), though there’s a diabolus ex machina in the person of Ryan’s ne’er-do-well brother Randy (Charles thought Ryan and Randy were supposed to be twins, but I didn’t get that impression), who was serving time in prison as Ryan built his fortune, who shows up at the end. I guess we’re supposed to assume he’s going to kill Brea for whatever reasons obtain in that family. Double Double Trouble has a lot of problems, starting with the silly title (it’s hard not to think of those old Doublemint gum commercials – “Double the pleasure, double the fun!”), but the big one is that Tami Roman is simply too old for her role(s). Makeup department head Kathleen Fowlstone and her associates plastered the stuff on her with a trowel to make her look younger, much as Dick Wolf’s people have been doing with Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit lately. Tami Roman’s imdb.com page lists her birthday as April 17; it doesn’t say April 17 of what year, but her credits list goes all the way back to 1993. She’s certainly well preserved, and I give her credit for helping develop the project (she’s also an executive producer on it, though that’s a nebulous credit that can mean just about anything), but it’s hard to take this project seriously when the leading actress is just too annuated.

Murder in Music City (Cal’s Kitchen, Dastoli Digital, Reel One Entertainment, Storyteller Studios, Studio TF1 America, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Fortunately, the next Lifetime movie my husband Charles and I watched Sunday, February 22, a “premiere” from 8 to 10 p.m., was considerably better than Double Double Trouble. It was called Murder in Music City and takes place in Nashville, Tennessee, mostly at the grandiose estate of country-music superstar Abilene Tucker (Deena Dill). It starts in her guest house, where a hunky young man named Jimmy Stone (Ty Trumbo) is practicing a new country song called “Stephanie.” We get a lot of shots of his hunky, muscular back as he sings, only someone wallops him from behind with a red electric guitar, killing him. Abilene Tucker calls her daughter Caroline (Madison Crawford) in a panic because she’s understandably worried that she’ll be accused of killing Jimmy, who was on Abilene’s property as both her latest boy-toy and her collaborator on a set of new songs she’s hoping will revitalize her career. The police officers assigned to the case, Detectives Moreno (Clark Moore) and Fisher (Olivia Crosby) – a white man and a Black woman – immediately arrest Abilene and assume she killed Jimmy after a lovers’ quarrel. Murder in Music City was written by our old friends Ken Sanders (story) and J. Bryan Dick (script), and directed by Dave Thomas. Sanders and Dick give us an engagingly large suspect pool, including the murdered man’s brother, Kyle Schneider (Brigdon York), who shows up to collect Jimmy’s belongings, including the blue-covered journals in which he wrote all his songs. Others include Abilene Tucker herself; Barbara (Elizabeth Houston), Abilene’s personal assistant; Marcia (Sharonne Lanier), Abilene’s (Black) agent; Hank James (John Castle), Abilene’s second husband and former duet partner; and Devin Brown (David Turner), a former stalker of Abilene’s who once turned up in Caroline’s bed and was busted in California, sentenced to a mental institution, but escaped and turned up in Nashville and tried to assault Caroline again until Kyle rescued her.

There’s a grim scene in which Caroline delivers Hank’s alimony check (since she was making so much money than he when they broke up, he gets alimony), and then Caroline and Kyle, who’ve become lovers, sneak into his home looking for Jimmy’s journals. At one point Abilene admits to Caroline that she wasn’t that good a mother to her because she was too focused on her career – she was devastated when her first husband (Caroline’s father) died suddenly and she married Hank on the rebound. She offers to take a few months off and take Caroline on a trip to Europe, but just then Abilene is formally exonerated of Jimmy’s murder and she decides to strike while the iron is hot and do an elaborate concert at the old Ryman Auditorium where the Grand Ole Opry show launched way back when (the location isn’t specified in the script, but it’s easily recognizable in the aerial shot on screen) followed by a Vegas-style residency there. She reconnects with Hank James to be her duet partner, and the two do a song called “Hey Baby” that’s credited to Hank as composer, but somehow (since she’s never heard it or seen the sheet music) Caroline recognizes it as “Stephanie,” the song Jimmy was working on when he was killed. Stephanie (Isabelle Almoyan) turns up herself, and she’s a woman Jimmy and Kyle fought over way back when during their early days in Seattle before Jimmy moved to Nashville in search of country-music stardom. Stephanie had originally been Kyle’s fiancée until Jimmy seduced her away from him.

For a while I was expecting Kyle to turn out to be the murderer, if only on the general Lifetime principle that the sexiest man in the cast is usually the killer, but in the end it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Ken Sanders and J. Bryan Dick ripped off the central gimmick of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and made four people legally responsible for Jimmy’s death. Abilene was the one who actually killed him after a fight, not over his affections, but over songwriting royalties: Abilene insisted on owning the copyrights of all the songs she and Jimmy wrote together, or the ones he wrote solo for their project. Jimmy was making the rounds of the record companies to land a solo deal for himself once his collaboration with Abilene Tucker made his reputation, and in a fit of anger Abilene clubbed him with her guitar. Hank, Barbara, and Marcia came together to cover it up, and when Caroline puts all this together they threaten to blacken her reputation and call her a drug-addicted psycho if she tells the cops or anyone else. They also burn Jimmy’s journal so there’ll be no evidence that he wrote the songs on which Abilene and Hank are staking their comeback hopes. Caroline greets the Unfantastic Four in Abilene’s dressing room on the night of her concert and extracts confessions from all of them, which she records not only on her own phone (which Barbara discovers and erases) but a separate one which none of the baddies notice. Caroline gives the evidence to Detectives Moreno and Fisher, who grimly note that they had the right suspect all along but the wrong motive, and Abilene, Hank, Barbara, and Marcia are all arrested.

The final shot is of Abilene Tucker, country star to the last, writing a new song on a yellow legal pad while in the jail holding cell, while Caroline and Kyle pair up even though one doesn’t hold out much hope for the longevity of their relationship – not when the biggest thing they have in common is her mother killed his brother. Murder in Music City is actually an engaging thriller, and I especially liked the two songs Deena Dill sang as Abilene Tucker in the final concert sequence just before she got arrested. I’m not sure if Deena Dill sang the songs or had a voice double – her Wikipedia page says she grew up in Nashville and appeared in a number of country-music videos with such stars as Billy Ray Cyrus, Aaron Tippin, George Ducas, and Trace Adkins, but not whether she has a voice herself – but I’m inclined to believe it's her own voice, if only because I can’t imagine a Lifetime movie having a big enough budget to hire a “ghost” singer. And while the ending is far-fetched, it’s at least conclusive and doesn’t have the maddening loose ends of the finish of Double Double Trouble!

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "There Is No 'i' in Slaughter" (BBC-TV, UKTV, Britbox, PBS, aired September 23, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, February 21) I watched two British mystery shows on KPBS: a Sister Boniface Mysteries episode called “There Is No ‘I’ in Slaughter” (after Great Slaughter, the fictitious town in central England where the show takes place) and a Father Brown show called “The Lord of the Dance.” It annoys me that KPBS’s announcer pronounces Sister Boniface’s last name as “BONEY-fass” when I’ve always assumed it’s “BONNI))-fuss.” “There Is No ‘I’ in Slaughter” was actually a pretty dreary episode – writer Asher Pirie seemed to assume that the way to enliven a show set in the mid-1960’s would be to camp it up in the manner of the 1960’s Batman and other shows of the time. It’s about a so-called “team-building exercise” two central English police forces, one from Great Slaughter and one from a neighboring town, are put through by a particularly obnoxious official named Lowsley (Robert Daws), which gets interrupted when a police official named Horace Winthorpe (Mark McDonnell) is found dead in a locked room. The gimmick Is that next to Winthorpe’s body is found a spinning top (though of course it had long since ceased to spin when Sister Boniface, played as usual by Lorna Watson, shows up on the scene and it’s lying in a pool of Winthorpe’s blood), and the trademark of the gangster who supposedly committed the fictional crime the real cops are investigating as part of their team-building exercise was to leave a similar wooden top next to the bodies of the victims he killed. Even more than usual for amateur detective stories, there’s an air of “step aside, you incompetent professional cops, and let the brainy outsider show you how it’s done.” When Lorna Watson enters as Sister Boniface, there’s a sense of fresh air blowing in from outside the silly rivalries between the two competing “teams.”

I spent a lot of this 45-minute episode nodding off and woke only in time for Sister Boniface to deduce not only the killer’s identity but how he pulled off the trick of making the murder appear to have taken place in the locked room. The killer was Constable Rupert Beagle (Tyler-Jo Richardson), an African-British officer whose quarrel with Winthorpe was that Winthorpe had killed Beagle’s father years before. Ostensibly it was an accident – Winthorpe had fired a gun at Beagle père thinking it wasn’t loaded, but it was, and the shot killed him – and Beagle’s killing Winthorpe was also an accident. They were quarreling and Beagle grabbed Winthorpe and slammed him against the metal foot of the room’s bed, causing Winthorpe’s death. Then, rather than report what he’d done to all the police on the scene, Beagle put the key to the room on a string attached to the top, pulled it through the outside window (which he was able to open from inside even though when the police and Sister Boniface discovered Winthorpe’s body, they checked the windows and they were inoperably locked from both sides), hung the key from the string, and thus dropped the key back in the room along with the top. Unfortunately for Beagle, in pulling the string he cut a wound in his hand, which gave him away to Sister Boniface. When he realizes he’s been discovered, Beagle threatens to commit suicide by jumping off a watchtower on the site of the exercise, but Sister Boniface talks him out of it and he turns himself in instead. Needless to say, the self-important goon who was running the silly contest insists on declaring it a tie because the other police who were participating stopped competing to solve the real-life killing. Despite Lorna Watson’s reliably sprightly appearance in the title role, this Sister Boniface Mysteries episode was pretty lame, and the contrast between the phony investigation and the real one just didn’t come off that well.

Father Brown: "The Lord of the Dance" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, aired February 27, 2025)

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

Fortunately, the Father Brown episode KPBS showed immediately after the Sister Boniface Mysteries program, “The Lord of the Dance,” on Saturday, February 21, was considerably better. Directed by Caroline Slater from a script by Rebecca Ramsden, “The Lord of the Dance” had to do with a self-important and spoiled rich-kid dancer named Frederick Thorncastle (John McCrea) who’s a contestant on a 1950’s TV show called Go Dancing! With his previous partner unavailable, he picks local girl Brenda Palmer (Ruby-May Martinwood) as her replacement even though Brenda is not only untrained as a dancer, she’s also African-British. Thorncastle is nearly killed when one of the TV lights unexpectedly falls down on the “X” that marked the spot where he was supposed to stand. Fortunately, he’d moved away from the lethal location just a few seconds before, so it’s just a case of attempted murder. Father Brown investigates and finds out a number of dark secrets, including Thorncastle’s ways of getting ahead in the Go Dancing! contest through underhanded means. Not only is he the grandson of the legendary “Dancing Duchess,” he’s also discovered that the show’s producer, August Bestwick (David Westhead), is Gay. He found this out when he followed Bestwick to the local Gay bar, which since this is the 1950’s and Gay sex is still illegal in Britain (as it was throughout the U.S. until 1961, when Illinois did a major revision of its criminal code and inadvertently left out the anti-sodomy law in the process), gives him the chance to blackmail the poor man. Father Brown deduces this from the matchbooks given out at the bar, which unlike most matchbooks has the establishment’s logo printed inside the matchbook rather than outside. Of course, being the hero of a 2020’s TV show, Father Brown is far more understanding and sympathetic to Bestwick’s sexuality than a real priest would have been in the 1950’s, or even now.

There’s a red-herring suspect named Ron White (Dan Hammill), who was an ex-con who reformed when he discovered ballroom dancing and decided to go straight, but the true culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Melody Byers (Laura Pigott), who along with her husband Colin (Christopher Jeffers) is a Go Dancing! contestant. Her motive is that for some reason she blames Thorncastle for the death of her brother, who was also her former dance partner (shades of Fred and Adele Astaire!), who fell during a dance, became paralyzed, and she dropped out of the dancing circuit to be his caregiver until he died two years later from kidney failure. Thorncastle insists it was her fault for insisting on doing a lift they hadn’t adequately practiced, but it turns out Thorncastle was responsible because he hadn’t sanded down Melody’s brother’s shoes, apparently a common practice in ballroom dancing to give you more traction on the floor. There’s a clever ending in which Father Brown realizes from Melody’s confession that she’s set another booby trap for Thorncastle, even though in order to save Thorncastle’s life he has to walk onto the Go Dancing! set in the middle of a live telecast and shove him out of the way. In the end Melody is promised leniency and Thorncastle gets his at the hands of the Dancing Duchess herself (Angela Rippon), who makes a deus ex machina entrance at the end and announces that she’s so appalled at his tactics to win the contest that she’s disowning him and forcing him to go work for a living like everyone else. This Father Brown episode had real charm and made logical sense, and it was nice to see a member of the hereditary aristocracy “get his” in the end, as just happened to the real-life ex-Prince Andrew in Britain and isn’t happening in the U.S., where Donald Trump has effectively given himself Presidential immunity.

To Catch a Cheater (Sunshine Films Florida, Studio TF1 America, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, February 15) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime, both of them rather grim thrillers with surprise twist endings. The first one was To Catch a Cheater, a story about three women who each gave birth to their daughters on the same day and thereafter formed a bond that lasted until … well, until the story began nearly 18 years later. The three older women are Monica Jackson (Kate Watson), Bridget Lewis (Sheila Leason), and Kim (Jessie Pettit), whose last name, if it were ever mentioned, I didn’t catch. Their daughters are Hannah Wilson (Jordan Kennedy), Charli Lewis (Valentina Rivas), and Megan (Lily Bowen). The movie begins with Charli proposing a so-called “cheaters’ pact” with Hannah and Megan to see if their boyfriends are pursuing opportunities for extra-relational activity. The way this pact works is sort of like Mozart’s (and Lorenzo da Ponte’s) opera Cosi fan Tutte with the genders reversed: each of the women will go online and assume a phony identity to see if they can attract each others’ boyfriends’ attention for transitory hook-ups. Accordingly Megan stands up her boyfriend and sends Hannah to try to seduce him instead. Only the evening ends in tragedy: Hannah slips and falls down outdoor stairs and ends up dead on the rocks on the beach below. Needless to say, Monica is less than thrilled at the sudden death of her daughter just as she’s about to turn 18 and graduate from high school to college and a better life. Monica’s estranged husband David (Philip Boyd) – they appear to have separated but not divorced, though David is living and working in another city and before she croaked Hannah mentioned an upcoming weekend she had to spend ßwith dad – returns to the scene and he and Monica reunite to determine what happened to their daughter.

The police rule Hannah’s death an accident, but both Monica and David are convinced it was murder. But who? As the grim story takes its course we learn that Kim’s husband Doug (Roy Lynam) was having an affair with Bridget. We also learn that Kim and Bridget had launched a company that, though all it appears to make is little scent or chemical bottles they display on their living-room table, is about either to get sold to a major company or do an initial public offering (IPO) which will make both of them millions. Only Bridget is hyper-concerned that nothing happen to them that would jeopardize their deal and cause a scandal that could derail it. (Maybe she should have thought of that before she got sexually involved with her partner’s husband.) Monica gets a series of threatening letters from anonymous sources warning her to stop investigating her daughter’s death, and in the end we learn that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Kim, who offed Hannah because Hannah had caught Kim’s husband Doug and Bridget making out in their SUV. Kim demanded that Hannah remain silent about this and, when Hannah refused, Kim pushed her down the flight of stairs and thereby killed her. Written by Rachel Morton and directed by old Lifetime hand Damián Romay, To Catch a Cheater is a good example of a Lifetime movie that could have been a great deal better if the Lifetime writer had known when to ease up on the passion pedal. (The metaphor comes from Roald Dahl’s short story “The Great Automatic Grammatisator,” in which a couple of computer scientists invent a machine than can write – essentially artificial intelligence decades early – including a set of organ-like pedals that control the amount of passion in the final text.) The idea of an estranged couple suddenly having to deal with the death of a daughter on the cusp of adulthood could have been a very interesting and moving drama, but writer Morton pushed too hard on the melodramatics and the result was another piece of Lifetime sludge – stylishly directed sludge (Damián Romay definitely knows his way around a camera), but sludge all the same.

Girl Who Vanished (Maverick Film, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

The second Lifetime movie I watched last night (Sunday, February 15) – and my husband Charles joined me for most of it – was called Girl Who Vanished, and like previous Lifetime telecasts Lost Boy in 2015 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/07/lost-boy-legrand-productions-lifetime.html) and The Boy Who Vanished a.k.a. The Forgotten Son (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-boy-who-vanished-aka-forgotten-son.html), it’s about a long-lost child who was supposedly kidnapped eight years earlier who seemingly returns to the fold. In this case the mother is Kate Tanner (Chelsea Gilson), the father – who divorced Kate over the trauma of losing their daughter and who, like his opposite number in To Catch a Cheater, returns to the family to help acclimate their daughter on her homecoming – is Matt (Jon Eric Hoffman). The returnee is Emily (Isabella Carlsen) and the younger sister who wasn’t kidnapped and has had to live the past eight years traumatized by her mother’s overprotectiveness is Lily (Rylee Reagan, top-billed). The film opens with Lily sneaking into the Tanners’ home after a night out with her age-peer girlfriends and Kate catching her and grounding her. Then Emily shows up, insisting that she’s really the Tanners’ long-lost daughter and supplying a wealth of background information to make the identity convincing. Emily even takes a DNA test which says she’s the Tanners’ biological offspring. Kate is overjoyed at the return of her daughter, but Lily is sure something is “off” about her and the new girl, whoever she is, is not Emily.

The police assign a psychiatrist, Dr. Salazar (Lisha Hackney, one of the heavy-set African-Americans Lifetime likes to cast as authority figures), to treat Emily and help her over the traumas of adjusting to her new environment – Emily says she spent the intervening eight years living with a single man who just wanted a child of his own to raise. Only Dr. Salazar is nonplussed that Emily doesn’t show the usual signs of trauma one would expect from a child who was actually kidnapped and forced to live with strangers for that long a time. Lily asks for an appointment to discuss Emily’s case with Dr. Salazar, but the day she’s supposed to meet her Dr. Salazar is found dead in her office, which is apparently a live/work space. Next Emily does an interview with podcaster Naomi Ackerman (Jessica DeBonville), who specializes in stories about traumatized kids, only Naomi holds back on airing the interview because she’s suspicious of Emily’s lack of affect during it. Lily calls Ackerman and makes an appointment to see her, but when she goes to the scheduled meeting place Ackerman, too, is dead, murdered in what was apparently a robbery gone bad. Next Lily is accosted by John Norris (Phil Talamonti), a former police detective who worked Emily’s disappearance when it happened, only he became convinced that Emily had been murdered by one or both of his parents. (Was writer Daniel West thinking of JonBenet Ramsey here? One of the most mysterious aspects of that case was that the only people who could have had access to her were her parents, and yet they had no discernible motive because they were making tons of money exploiting JonBenet in children’s beauty pageants and her death would end that gravy train.)

Norris’s efforts to implicate the Tanners in Emily’s disappearance ended up costing him his job; he drifted into alcoholism but he hung around the scenes, still convinced that one or both of the adult Tanners did in Emily. Norris contacts Lily and asks her to notice any parts of the Tanners’ home that had been changed since the days before Emily’s disappearance. Kate had kept the house exactly the same as it was before Emily left, including the décor of her room which was adorned with posters for boy bands like the “Boulevard Boys” whom Emily especially liked. Unfortunately, the same mystery killer who knocked off Dr. Salazar and Ackerman strikes against Norris, sneaking into his car, strangling him from the back seat, and planting liquor bottles in the car so it will look like he killed himself accidentally while driving drunk. But the information Norris gave Lily allows her to find out the one spot in or around the house that had been changed – a new mini-garden Kate planted after Emily’s disappearance – and Lily starts digging it out and finds [spoiler alert!] the remains of her real sister. It turns out [double spoiler alert!] that Kate actually killed the real Emily during an argument (though director David Benullo inserted a brief closeup that hinted that the killer might have been Emily’s dad Matt), then covered it up by burying her in that newly planted mini-garden. The false “Emily” turns out to be Rachel Sullivan, who concocted the scheme along with a scapegrace boyfriend who only appears in one scene and then is dispatched by the dauntless Kate, who burns him to death by spilling gasoline outside the van in which he lives and then igniting it with a flare.

The two of them researched the real Emily from the press interviews the Tanners gave after her “disappearance” and coached Rachel to pass as Emily. The DNA test was faked from Lily’s own, which Rachel obtained from Lily’s retainer. Lily caught her out with one of the classic strategies used in impersonation stories: inventing a false memory (in this case, a treehouse where the two sisters supposedly played) and catching “Emily” out on it. The film ends with a brutal confrontation between Kate and Lily at the real Emily’s gravesite, though luckily the police arrive and arrest both Kate and Rachel (my husband Charles wondered why Rachel was arrested), though Lily ultimately visits Rachel in prison. Girl Who Vanished was a decent enough Lifetime thriller, though as with To Catch a Cheater one gets the impression that it could have been a lot better if writer West had cooled it on the melodramatics and not taken the easy way out by making mom the killer, thereby creating the problem Fritz Lang identified with the trick ending he was forced to use in his last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. In that film the supposedly innocent man, a reporter who frames himself for murder to prove how easy it is to convict the innocent on circumstantial evidence, turns out actually to be guilty of murder, and as Lang complained to his producer, you can’t create a central character, make the audience identify with and feel for them, and then in the last two minutes drop the switcheroo on the audience and reveal that they’re really evil.

The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story (P. F. Birch Productions, Röhm Feifer Entertainment, Studio TF 1 America, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Last night (Sunday, February 14) Lifetime showed a TV-movie that was, to say the least, an odd choice for Valentine’s Day: The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story. It was actually based, at least loosely, on a true story: Monica White (Lela Rochon), a divorcée whose 18-year-old son Isaiah (Trezzo Mahoro) has been her only companion since her divorce from her scapegrace husband Daniel (whom we never meet as an on-screen character, nor do we learn much about him or why they broke up), is encouraged by her best friend Layla to log onto a dating app called Connections. Monica lives in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where she teaches pre-school and has to deal with a particularly obnoxious boy named Rayleigh who keeps bullying a Black girl named Tracy. (The reason I’m not supplying more names for the actors involved is so far imdb.com’s credit list has only four names on it.) Meanwhile, Anthony Eugene “Tony” Robinson (the darkly handsome Jarod Joseph) is trolling Connections looking for women he can pick up, not for sex but to kill them. His modus operandi is to meet them in bars after having set up a date via Connections, take them to a nearby motel, kill them by strangling them in the middle of the sex act, then load their bodies into shopping carts and abandon them in the middle of parking lots. Tony lives in Washington, D.C. and works as a garbageman (which gives him a convenient way of disposing of his victims’ bodies) until he gets fired midway through the movie by a typically obnoxious boss for being chronically late to work. Writers Miriam Van Ernst and David Weaver don’t give us much of an explanation as to what Anthony’s motives are. Midway through the movie, when he and Monica finally meet face-to-face, he tells her that he had a girlfriend named Skye Allen who suddenly and without warning dropped dead of a heart attack, but we suspect that’s a B.S. story he just made up. (The reporting on the case in The Washington Post stated there was a real Skye Allen who died in a hospital, and her death was ruled accidental but there’s the possibility that Anthony killed her.)

The film was expertly directed by Elisabeth Röhm, who as an assistant district attorney on Law and Order for five years (2001 to 2005) certainly learned something from working in Dick Wolf’s atelier on how to do suspense. Also, since February is Black History Month, this is one of Lifetime’s “race movies” in which the central characters are Black; the only significant white role is that of the no-nonsense woman police chief in Fairfax County, Virginia who leads the investigation when the body of one of Anthony’s victims is found in her jurisdiction. I didn’t catch her name but I did the racially ambiguous male detective who’s working under her, Det. Lareto. The cops pull the case when a white store clerk working the parking lot picking up shopping carts discovers the body of Tonita Smith (Princess Davis) in one as he’s on duty. The local media immediately dub the unknown murderer “The Shopping Cart Killer” and writers Van Ernst and Weaver can’t resist planting a few clues. When Isaiah learns from his mom that she’s met a man online, he says, “He could be a serial killer,” having no idea that he’s right. Also cinematographer Tony Gorman carefully lights Anthony in shadow as he sits in a spartan room with a bank of computers, while Monica gets full light as she goes about her daily routine, hangs out with Layla and hears out her complaints about Layla’s boyfriend Jaden, and summons Rayleigh’s mother Beverly to school for a parent-teacher conference about Rayleigh’s behavior. Beverly is instantly hostile and pulls the how-dare-you-summon-me-when-I-need-to-be-at-work routine, but Monica and we both notice a bruise on her chest that signals that Beverly is being abused at home by Rayleigh’s dad and that’s the reason for Rayleigh’s bad behavior. There are a few close calls, including a woman in a red dress who meets Anthony at a bar but is so weirded out by his odd behavior she bails on him in mid-date and we’re of course thinking, “Lucky her.”

When Anthony and Monica finally meet in person he immediately wants to move in with her, and she’s appalled but allows him to sleep on her couch. When they finally do have sex together, for what’s her first time since her divorce, he literally can’t get it up and the implication is that only by killing his partner can he have a release. There’s an intriguing story on the real Anthony Robinson on the Arts & Entertainment Web site (https://www.aetv.com/articles/monica-white-shopping-cart-killer) which suggests that he was into S/M (the only hint of that we get in this movie is a scene towards the end in which Monica references his previously expressed desire to tie her up, surprises him and ties him up instead) and he was also Bisexual and once expressed his anger at Monica by literally peeing in her bed. In the movie there’s no hint of that, but Monica gets a complaint from her 19-year-old niece Jasmine that Anthony hit on her at Monica’s 50th birthday party. She immediately orders Anthony out of her house, and he responds by waiting outside until he’s able to find an unlocked door, let himself back in, and threaten her. Just then the police arrive; that quite imposing woman police chief in Fairfax has figured out his identity by discovering a surveillance photo of him taken with Tonita way back when as he was escorting her from the bar to the motel room where he killed her. Anthony tries to escape by taking a Silver Streak bus back to D.C., but the woman police chief and Det. Lareto are onto him. They have the bus re-routed off the highway and order the driver and all the other passengers off so they can arrest Anthony. Anthony Robinson is due to be sentenced in May 2026, and the real Monica White told The Washington Post that she’s been too scared by the whole experience to date again. The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story is actually pretty good Lifetime fare, redeemed by Elisabeth Röhm’s direction and an appropriately chilling performance by Jarod Joseph as Anthony. It’s true that this is yet another Lifetime movie in which the hottest, sexiest guy in the cast is the villain, but Joseph brings the role a kind of smoky intensity that makes his performance special even though of course we can’t stand him. Just as I got a used videotape of the 1996 film The Phantom because I’d been so impressed by Billy Zane’s performance as the bad guy in James Cameron’s Titanic I wanted to see a movie in which he’d been the good guy, so I’d love to see a film in which Jarod Joseph played a character I could root for and lust over!