Deadly Dating Game (Dawn’s Light, Bandit Media Capital, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon I looked up the Lifetime network schedule and found that at 2 p.m. they were showing a movie I was interested in which I had missed on its first go-round: Deadly Dating Game (originally filmed under the working title Deadly Radio Romance, which would have more accurately reflected just what the movie was about). It starts with a deliberately deceptive prologue which we learn only several acts later took place in New York City: a young Black man named Gavin Newman (Ivan Edwards) is out in a park with a young Black woman. They’re talking about how both of them have recently been through romantic breakups and ultimately decide they’re still not sufficiently healed from the wounds of their past relationships to start a new one. Then the woman takes a fall from a cement landing and hits her head on a pipe, killing her, and director Mike Hoy (working from a script by Kelly Peters and Amy Katherine Taylor – so once again we have a script written by women but directed by a man) cuts the sequence to make it look like Gavin murdered her.

The show then cuts to its main location, Austin, Texas, where Gavin’s ex, Shannon Baker (Skye Coyne), hosts a morning program on radio station KQAX (98.6 FM – did Peters and Taylor deliberately give it a frequency that sounds like the normal human body temperature?) that’s a mix of call-in, guest interviews, Shannon speaking and occasionally playing romantic records to give her listeners information that will help their love lives. With her own love life a mess – she hasn’t had a boyfriend since Gavin quit his job at KQAX, went to New York City and broke up with her – she accepts the suggestion of her assistant Hailey Michaels (Jillian Murray) that she broadcast about her need for a man and invite her listeners to call in with suggestions as to whom she should date next. With a premise like that I would have expected that she’d go on several dates with various men she’s been matched with by her callers, one of them would turn out to be a stalker, and the suspense would be over which one – while she and Gavin would end up working together to solve the mystery and in the process would re-fall in love and end up together again.

Gavin does indeed turn up in Austin, explaining that his New York job didn’t work out but a rival Austin station made him an offer and enabled him to return, only he shows up at so many of his and Shannon’s old haunts she becomes convinced that he’s stalking her. Shannon also has another, more obvious stalker, a nerdy young man who brings her blue-frosted cupcakes because at one point on her show she said she liked them, and he’s so obviously creepy we’re clearly meant to view him as a red herring. After a week of dealing with losers Shannon actually goes out with someone who seems at least a possible long-term partner, a doctor named Ian (Nick Caldwell). Their first date is a disaster because he keeps getting work calls on his cell phone to which he has to respond, but the two like each other enough that they make arrangements to see each other again. They have a dinner date that gets disrupted by the sudden appearance of Gavin, but they agree to a third date as long as it doesn’t involve food consumption. Ian says one of his favorite bands is playing a club date, but before they can meet up for that he comes to Shannon’s place to meet up with her – and is murdered by the typical Lifetime killer in a hoodie (a gimmick Lifetime has been using a lot lately so neither the victim nor the audience can tell the gender of the killer).

Ian’s body is dragged away from her home but she still has enough of a connection with the victim that Shannon is interviewed by the woman police detective investigating the case. Shannon does her program in the company of two people, Hailey and Jayden (Kelsey Shryer) – a male, despite the feminine-sounding names of both the character and the actor playing him – whom I thought would turn out either to be Gay (I half-expected him to tell Shannon either “My boyfriend swings both ways” or “My boyfriend has a straight brother”) or to be the stalker-killer himself, acting out of an unrequited crush on Shannon (and though for most of the movie Kelsey Shryer is sitting behind a desk and seemingly serving no function, he gets up in one scene and we get to see both a nice basket and a nice ass). They’re supposed to be assisting her in the show but it’s not clear what either of them do – one would think one of them would be her call screener, but if so they’re doing a lousy job because they’re letting her stalker(s) get on-air time with her any time they choose.

What’s more, as soon as they realize the stalker is calling they cut him off – the logical thing would seem to have been to have Shannon keep the guy talking and call 911 on a different phone to ask the police to trace the call – but this is a script that is full of lapses of logic like that. As she gets more stalking calls Shannon insists on continuing her broadcasts from the KQAX studio instead of using any of the opportunities modern technology would offer – like re-running previous segments, pre-recording the show or doing it remotely – thereby making herself a sitting duck for whoever is out to get her. At least part of Shannon’s reluctance either to take a vacation or to do her show in a different way comes from the fact that her producer/boss Franklyn Jones (Maurice Whitfield) has got her a nomination for Austin’s Broadcaster of the Year award, and this would be a major publicity boost for her and KQAX. The cops manage to clear Gavin because he has an alibi for Ian’s murder, and this brings him and Shannon back together. Then Shannon and Franklyn are having dinner at Shannon’s house, only someone sends them a bottle of wine which turns out to be poisoned; Franklyn drinks the spiked wine and gets violently ill, though he survives.

Eventually the culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Hailey Michaels – whom my husband Charles had pegged as early as the second act (though I misunderstood him and thought he was going along with my suspicion that it would turn out to be Jayden, partly on the idea that the writers were setting him up to have an only-woman-who-can-turn-me-straight crush on Shannon and partly on the mystery convention that the character who seems to have no other reason to be there turns out to be the killer) – though as Peters and Taylor started dropping hints in her direction I still guessed wrong about her motive. I thought it was professional jealousy – Hailey had made it clear she wanted an on-air show of her own at KQAX and she targets Franklyn after he decides not to give her an open slot – but it turns out the real reason was she was in love with Gavin herself. The prologue turns out to be Hailey having gone to New York to chase after Gavin, seeing him with another woman, killing her and then returning to Austin, hoping that his breakup with Shannon will be permanent and she can get Gavin on the rebound. This doesn’t really explain why she would kill Ian – one would think if she were after Shannon’s ex she’d want her seriously involved with another man – but eventually the police figure it all out, rescue Shannon from a fight-to-the-death with Hailey, and as the show ends Shannon announces her reunion with Gavin on the air while Hailey is in a prison mental ward talking like she’s doing a radio show. (Oh, St. Alfred Hitchcock, you have a lot to answer for for showing Norman Bates in a strait-jacket talking to himself at the end of Psycho! Too many lesser talents have copied a gimmick you did superbly and they do ineptly.)

I think Charles summed it up when – after having fly-specked Deadly Dating Game with comments, mostly on the plot holes and general improbability – he said it wasn’t an especially bad Lifetime movie but not an especially good one either. Aside from the plot improbabilities, the main problem with Deadly Dating Game was the casting: Skye Coyne and Jillian Murray look so much alike that it’s often hard to tell them apart, especially during their climactic fight scene. Also, Ivan Evans as Gavin is O.K.-looking but not particularly exciting either physically or as a personality, and he and Skye Coyne are simply unbelievable as a couple – not because he’s Black and she’s white (it’s a matter of what little racial progress we’ve made in this country that that seems much less remarkable than it used to, and it’s not at all an issue in the plot) but because there’s zero chemistry between them. Frankly, if the writers wanted Shannon to have a Black boyfriend, they should have had her end up with her boss Franklyn; Maurice Whitfield, though visibly older than Ivan Evans, is far sexier and more charismatic. Aside from the plot and casting glitches, Deadly Dating Game is probably as good as one could expect a Lifetime movie to be – aside from the few, like Restless Virgins, that have actually grabbed issues of race, sex and class and done exciting, vibrant things with them – and it certainly delivers what Maureen Dowd called the “pussy in peril” Lifetime formula even though this time the pussy is in peril from another pussy!