My Father’s Other Family (Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night Lifetime showed last week’s “premiere” at 6 p.m. and then followed up with a new “premiere” at 8. The one from last Sunday was called My Father’s Other Family, which I assumed would be a Michael Feifer production since he’s had a penchant for stories about characters who lived double lives and maintained two different families (though Ida Lupino’s 1953 film The Bigamist, with Edmond O’Brien in the title role, remains my touchstone for this particular story premise). It turned out to be a Reel One Entertainment presentation, originally shot under the working title Deadly DNA (which might have been stronger and more attention-getting than the rather blah one they went with), directed by Marjorie Ouellet from a script by Taylor Warren Goff. Surprisingly, imdb.com is behind the curve on this film and has only an incomplete page which doesn’t list any of the actors, and I had to go to another page (https://meaww.com/my-fathers-other-family-full-cast-list-kimberly-sue-murray-hannah-anderson-cory-lee-lifetime) to find out who was in this movie and what roles they played.

Set in Knoxville, Tennessee (though no one in the film offers even the trace of a Southern accent) the story opens with a prologue showing a heavy-set older man being shot, though we have no idea who the assailant is. The scene then cuts to a successful restaurant being run by the dead man’s daughter, Shelby Parker (Kimberly Sue-Murray), who’s living with boyfriend Luke (Morgan David Jones, tall, lanky and sandy-haired in the usual type of the “good” Lifetime husband or spouse but at least a bit sexier than most of them) but putting him off when he suggests they get married (which becomes an important plot point later on). Shelby is also the successful proprietress of a family restaurant rather unimaginatively called “Family Restaurant” with business partner Jen (Cory Lee, who from 2005 to 2013 pursued a career as a singer and made four CD’s, the first of which was called What a Difference a Day Makes – a song choice which makes me curious to hear it.) As a surprise present, Luke gives Shelby one of those DNA testing kits that’s supposed to reveal your entire family tree – only it reveals more than either Shelby or Luke expected it to.

Shelby thus finds that in addition to the mother she knew about, who died in an accident while Shelby was still a teenager, dad had another family consisting of Dora, whom we see as a heavy, middle-aged woman who needs virtually round-the-clock care for a rare nervous disorder; and her daughter Rose McGowan (Hannah Anderson), who dropped out of high school in her junior year to take care of mom full-time and is working as a waitress to make ends meet. (Odd that they gave this character the same name as the real-life actress who starred in the first Lifetime Devil in the Flesh movie in 1998 and later took a leading role in exposing, so to speak, Harvey Weinstein’s sexual shenanigans.) Shelby seeks out Rose for a meeting while Luke insists on a DNA test, which confirms that the two women are indeed biological kin. If this were a Hallmark Channel movie that’s where it would have stayed, with the two women working out the emotional uncertainties of their new-found relationship, but this being Lifetime writer Goff had to introduce an element of skullduggery.

She did so in the person of Rose’s boyfriend Travis (regrettably not named on either imdb.com or meaww.com, especially since he’s the sexiest guy in the movie). While Shelby and Luke are out having dinner with Rose, Travis shows up at Shelby’s and Luke’s home with a lockpick. He takes note of Shelby’s jewelry but doesn’t steal any; instead he photographs the will left by Shelby’s late father, Alan Parker (also the name of the director of Midnight Express), then takes it to an attorney named Fred Spolnitz to see if there’s any legal way to break the will, since it left dad’s entire estate to Shelby. Spolnitz solemnly informs him that the will is legally ironclad, but if Shelby herself were to die while she neither has a will nor a husband (hence the significance that she and Luke are not legally married), the estate would automatically pass to Rose on Shelby’s death. That’s all Travis needs to hear: soon thereafter he tries to break into Shelby’s car and club her to death with a blunt object, but she manages to get the car started and escape. Later we hear a scene between Travis and Rose meant to tell us that Rose is fully involved with the plot and it wasn’t just something Travis thought of on her own, and it’s hinted – and later proved when the local cops discover a bloody blanket in Rose’s car and the blood is Travis’s, even though they don’t have his body – that Rose killed Travis because of his incompetent bungling of the job of killing Shelby.

There are also brief hints that they previously pulled off a similar scam on a man named “Bob” – which had me waiting for a scene which would establish that Shelby and Rose really aren’t related and they faked a DNA test result to make it seem like they were – before Rose continues on her next attempt to murder Shelby. It seems that Goff was following Anton Chekhov’s dictum that whenever a writer introduces a pistol in act one it has to go off in act three – only in this case the “pistol” is sesame seeds, to which we learn from Jen that Shelby is deathly allergic to – which, of course, means Rose will buy a package of organic sesame seeds, grind them up and sneak them into a pot of soup Shelby is cooking for her customers, so Shelby will taste the contaminated soup and croak already. Rose has stolen Shelby’s Epipen and sabotaged it, but hasn’t reckoned with her having another one for emergencies, so Shelby ends up in the hospital but still alive. Then Luke gets the key clue when he visits the restaurant and Jen asks him, purely as a favor, to take out the trash – and he finds the empty bag of sesame seeds and realizes someone deliberately spiked the soup to kill Shelby, though he still doesn’t realize who.

The finale occurs when Rose kidnaps Jen and holds her hostage, sending Shelby a text that she’s going to kill Jen unless Shelby shows up … alone. When Shelby shows up Rose holds a gun on her and threatens to kill her. Shelby hits on the idea of calling Rose’s mother Dora to intervene and talk Rose out of it, but in a surprise twist (that really isn’t all that surprising) we learn that Dora was not only involved in Rose’s plot but was the mastermind of it. Dora never forgave Alan for abandoning her half of the family once Shelby was born, and she concocted this scheme to get Alan Parker’s fortune for herself and her daughter. Ultimately the police arrive and the conspirators are either arrested or killed (once you’ve seen as many Lifetime movies as I have their endings tend to blur into each other, though I think this time they killed off the mother and let Rose get arrested) and Shelby accepts Luke’s marriage proposal (which he makes when he’s just returned from the hospital after Rose wounded him with her gun) and celebrates with him and Jen, saying they’re the only three family members she needs. My Father’s Other Family was an O.K. Lifetime movie, acceptably directed and decently acted (the only really sexy and charismatic performer was the actor playing Travis, and he exited way too soon) but suffering from how much Kimberly Sue-Murray and Hannah Anderson look alike. Yes, I’m often faulting casting directors for hiring people who don’t look at all like each other to play biological relatives, but this time they went too far in the other direction. When the heroine and the villainess are engaging in a fight to the death at the finish, it’s nice when they look different enough you at least know whom to root for!