Single Black Female (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 10 p.m. yesterday Charles and I watched another Lifetime movie, Single Black Female, which was a good deal closer to their usual fare than The Family That Preys. Though I’d never seen it before, I’d run across it a few times before on Lifetime’s schedule, and it was basically Stalker Plot #101. Single Black Female was directed by Shari L. Carpenter and written by Sa’Rah Jones (that’s how her frist name is spelled on imdb.com) and Tessa Evelyn Scott, and features the story of Monica Harris (Raven Goodwin), a Black woman of size who is hoping to score the gig hosting the morning “Tea Time” program on a local TV station in Houston as soon as the incumbent retires. Alas, she has a white woman rival, Elodie Price (Erin Ownbey), who’s polite to Monica’s face but underneath is working so that she, not Marion, will get the job. Though the woman currently hosting Tea Time is Black, Elodie is obviously counting on her white skin color to get her the job over Monica, who’s not only Black but is clearly a “woman of size.” I don’t mind large women – one of the reasons I became a huge fan of Adele the first time I saw her perform on TV is I respected her for staying the size nature made her instead of starving herself to the proportions of a concentration-camp victim – but for some reason I got tired of watching two jumbo-sided women, Monica and her assistant Simone Hicks (Amber Riley), rival each other.

At times I thought I was watching two linebackers from the Women’s National Football Conference (which really exists, by the way; it was founded in 2018 and played its inaugural season a year later, and it was the successor to the Women’s National Football League, which played from 1974 to 1988), and it occurred to me that if Single Black Female were remade as a musical Megan Thee Stallion and Lizzo would be good casting for the leads. Simone was hired by the TV station’s management and assigned to work with Monica as her assistant, but Monica completely trusts her and takes her into her confidence. Of course, this is a huge mistake on Monica’s part; Simone turns out to be a psychopath who spent a term in a mental institution after her mother burned to death in a house fire (authorities couldn’t prove that she set it, which is why she ended up in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison). Monica is at her wit’s end because she just buried her beloved father, who was the mayor of Houston, and also she’s just gone through a rather bitter breakup from her ex-boyfriend André (Kevin Savage) after she found out he’d had sex with another woman in a hotel restroom. Midway through the movie she ends up tricking with Eric (Devale Ellis), a Black guy who works at the TV station that hosts Tea Time, only unbeknownst to her Simone, who had the hots for Eric herself, was hiding in her bedroom closet the whole time and is well aware of everything that happened between them. (The soft-core porn scene of Monica and Eric getting it on is, as usual, one of the most entertaining aspects of this film.)

Needless to say, Simone is a total bitch and bastard (literally as well as figuratively), first severely beating Elodie (whose first name seems like the writers couldn’t decide whether to call her “Melody” or “Eloise,” so they came up with something roughly between the two) and then leaving her so bruised that she can’t appear on camera and is forgotten about (or at least never seen again) for the duration of the movie. Next Simone gets tired of the drunken snooping of the landlady, Mrs. Fletcher (Gail-Everett Smith) and literally severs her head and walks around with the head in a tote bag. Eventually it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Simone set the whole thing up, killing Monica’s beloved father with a poisoned drink after she ran into him in a bar, and also seducing Monica’s boyfriend André and getting him to have sex with her by drugging him (essentially the Bill Cosby bit with the genders reversed). She’s also taken out André along the way by sneaking up behind him and clubbing him, and her motive for all this is [double spoiler alert!] Simone and Monica are half-sisters.

It seems that their dad the apparently super-respectable politician fucked Simone’s mom just after his legal wife gave birth to Monica, which explains their physical resemblance (this film’s casting directors obviously had to find two women wh would look enough like each other to be believable as blood relatives) and also shows why Simone grew up without a father figure in her life at all. Her intentiion is to get rid of Monida and take over her life – we even see an early scene that makes this clear when she’s holding a pretend microphone and introducing herself as “Simone Hicks – no, Simone Harris” – and she ties up Monica and tries to burn her house down (the two of them live in adjoining rooms on Mrs. Fletcher’s estate because no sooner did Monica find a room there after she left André, Simone followed her and got the next room), only the police and fire authorities come in time, Monica escapes and Simone is presumably killed in the fire, though there’s enough ambiguity to set up a potential sequel. After the dreary Hallmarkisms of The Famlly That Preys, Single Black Female is at least a return to the good clean dirty ful of the usual Lifetime movie, even though the writing is pretty far-fetched (to say the least) and, as I’ve written about Lifetime directors before, I don’t really think I can judge Shari L. Carpenter’s talents fairly until I can see what she does with a better script than this.