Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: The Kristine Carlson Story (Lifetime Films, 2021)

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

With the holiday season approaching, the Lifetime channel is focusing more and more on tearjerkers and less on the sorts of “pussies in peril” crime dramas I like best from the network’s fare. But last night’s much-hyped “premiere” was actually quite good: Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: The Kristine Carlson Story. Among the points of hype for this film was the presence of John McCain’s daughter Meghan as one of the executive producers. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff is based on the true story of Dr. Richard Carlson (Jason MacDonald, the sort of tall, lanky, blankly handsome but not particularly sexy actor who usually gets cast as “good” husbands in Lifetime movies), who lived in San Francisco, and his wife Kristine, who suddenly had to take over his franchise as well as grieving for him and handling the adolescent rebellion of their two daughters when he suddenly died (the film isn’t specific as to when it takes place, aside from it being relatively recently, but Dr. Carlson’s Wikipedia page gives his date of death as December 13, 2006) of a blood clot that shot up from his leg to his lungs while the flight he was taking from San Francisco to New York was descending to land. The film opens with Dr. Carlson’s wife Kristine (Heather Locklear – so this is that rarity, a Lifetime movie starring someone I’ve actually heard of from other things!) sitting in a car when her cell phone rings. Thinking it’s her husband calling in from New York, she says she’s surprised to hear he got in so fast – only instead of her husband, the voice on the phone is a stranger telling her that there was an accident on the plane and her husband was taken to a hospital where he “expired.” She doesn’t know that “expired” is med-speak for “died” (ironically I learned that from my late partner John Gabrish, who had worked as a nurse in nursing homes; later when he died I was asked by the person from the coroner’s office, “When did he expire?,” and in the middle of my own grief I gave a brief smile that I knew what that meant because John had taught me), but she soon learns the truth. Naturally she’s devastated, not only by the magnitude of her loss but also its suddenness.

The film, directed by Ellen S. Pressman from a script by Shannon Bradley Colleary, then flashes back 10 years earlier, when the Carlsons were living together in San Francisco with two young daughters. Richard has just got a job offer from a company in Texas to manage their employee relations department and he’s thinking of taking it – his previous 10 books have bombed and he’s worried about being able to support his family – but Kristine is adamant that he needs to keep pursuing his dream no matter what the cost to them. Then a deus ex machina arrives by phone; one of the Carlson kids takes the call and garbles the name, but it soon dawns on Richard that the call is from a member of the staff of Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. It seems that Oprah liked Dr. Carlson’s last book, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (And It’s All Small Stuff), so much she had it on her night table and read bits of it constantly. In fact, she liked it so much she wants to have the author on her show … the very next day. So Dr. Carlson flies out to Chicago, does an interview with Oprah, and quite naturally the exposure sends sales of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff through the proverbial roof. He spends the next 10 years cranking out a whole series of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff books, they get to keep their San Francisco home and live well, until suddenly he dies. The initial scene of his death is repeated about half an hour through the movie, and from then on the story becomes Kristine’s struggle to keep herself going, navigate the five stages of grief (I got the impression writer Colleary had a copy of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying and was mentally ticking off each stage as her script put Kristine through it) and deal with things she didn’t expect.

One of the biggest things she didn’t expect that would result from her sudden widowhood is that she’s broke; Richard’s attorney explains that they had been in the process of setting up a living trust so she and the kids could be maintained if anything happened to him, but he died before he could complete that process. So all his money is tied up in probate and Kristine has the rather weird task of finding a job of her own to keep her family going. The strain of losing their father also devastates her daughters, Jasmine (Natasha Bure) – nicknamed “Jazzy,” and Kenna (Ella Dorsch), a freshman (shouldn’t that be “freshperson”?) at the same high school. Both of them had previously been high achievers and had played on the school’s soccer team, but Jazzy’s grades do a major downhill slide as she blows off assignments and Kenna gets bounced down from the varsity soccer team to the junior varsity after her playing skills decline. They’re also facing pressure from the Carlsons’ best friends, Zach Avery (Rob Moran) and his wife Elyse (Malaysian-born actress Teck), who by sheer bad luck are going through a divorce just as Kristine is navigating the shoals of grief and the obligation to keep her late husband’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff “brand” going once the initial flurry of sales a writer gets when he croaks dies down and newer books crowd out his in the marketplace. Among the people Kristine has to deal with in that regard is Brianna (Emily Rose), who managed Carlson’s franchise for his publisher, accompanied him on his book tours and throws so much intimate body language when his name comes up that both Kristine and we start suspecting that she and Richard had an affair.

What’s more, Jazzy is putting her dreams of attending UC Berkeley on hold because she’s fallen in love with a young fellow student named Henry (Will Murden, tall, blond and considerably sexier than most of the blankly pretty twinks Lifetime and its producers usually hire for the schoolgirl’s age-peer boyfriend), and about two-thirds of the way through Jazzy learns that Henry has got her pregnant. Kristine tears into her about the irresponsibility of her having sex without “protection” – at times, particularly when both her girls want to go out for the evening and she peremptorily orders them to stay, she sounded an awful lot like my mother – and Jazzy tells mom that she actually was on the pill, but it has a 0.8 percent failure rate and it was her bad luck to be one of the 0.8 percent. As Kristine deals with the various crises in her own life, she also has to face people quoting her – often without realizing they’re doing it – the self-help bromides her late husband wrote in his books. There’s also a Black gardener named Tim (Tyler Meritt) whom Richard hired, who shows up after he died to explain to Kristine that the job is going to be more difficult (and more expensive) than anticipated because there’s “soil erosion” under the foundation of their house – and this turns out to be one of the biggest “plants” I’ve ever seen in a movie supposedly based on a true story. The night Kristine literally orders her kids to stay home instead of going out to see their friends, a big storm hits and threatens the stability of their house. They spend the night frantically gathering sandbags (how did they happen to have them on hand?) to brace the soil to keep it from eroding under the house and causing the house to slide off its foundation. Their former friends Zach and Elyse, who previously had blackballed Hanna from the school soccer team to make room for their own kids, come by to help and in the process announce that they’re reconciling.

Kristine tells off Brianna and announces that she is going to take over management of the brand – and Brianna admits that, though she wanted to have an affair with Richard, he wouldn’t. The story ends with Kristine writing the book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Women – a counterpart to Richard’s own follow-up, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Men, and a work he promised his publisher she would write for the franchise. (Actually Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Women was published in 2001, five years before Richard Carlson’s death, and he and Kristine were listed as co-authors.) There’s one last crisis Colleary’s script puts Kristine through, as her daughter Jazzy has a medical emergency while giving birth to hers and Henry’s child (a boy) and nearly dies from, you guessed it, a blood clot that was moving up from her leg until her doctors spotted it in time and gave her the blood-thinning drug heparin. The final credits state that Kristine Carlson has kept the Don’t Sweat brand alive through a series of books and workshops of her own and her daughters went to college and got advanced degrees, and Jazzy is living with her husband and “their” five kids – which I presume means that she and Henry stayed together, which given the usual brevity of teenage marriages (especially ones involving an unexpected baby) was nice. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff seemed a bit too “planted” at times, as if writer Colleary was cherry-picking the reality of Kristine Carlson’s life to shape them into a carefully structured Hollywood script, but it was also told with a refreshing understatement and lack of sentimentality. What happened to Kristine Carlson and its effects on her family and friendships was quite bad enough without the usual “milking it” filmmakers do when dealing with so inherently sad a subject, and the script and Pressman’s direction tell the story honestly and quietly – and the acting is good enough to do justice to the tale, even though (as I noted above) Heather Locklear’s performance in her angrier moments, when she’s taking out her own frustrations on her kids, reminded me all too much of my own mother in her rages!