Friday Night Sext Scandal (MarVista Entertainment, Neshama Entertainment, Wishing Floor Films, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 17) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of recent Lifetime movies, both set in high school and at least nominally about students there (though one on-line reviewer complained that the actors on the first Lifetime film of last night’s program, Friday Night Sext Scandal, were too old for their parts). First was the awkwardly titled Friday Night Sext Scandal, in which the main characters were the slightly built Shawn Martins (Anthony Timpano, not exactly a hunk to die for but certainly easy on the eyes) and Lauren (Keana Lyn Bastidas). Shawn’s and Lauren’s mothers are both raising them as single parents (as usual with Lifetime it’s not at all clear what happened to their dads, though at least in Shawn’s case it’s hinted that his father is dead) and have been best buds for years. Lauren often gives Shawn rides to school, and the two of them seem to have one of those oddball relationships (like Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s original novel Frankenstein) that isn’t biologically incestuous but seems so emotionally. We also get the impression that Shawn has a major crush on Lauren but Lauren sees Shawn only as a friend. Things appear to turn around for Shawn when he finally makes the starting lineup of Westmoorland High School’s football team, “The Vikings,” and he befriends the various other guys on the team. Among his new-found friends are the team captain, Woodley Jones (Jamie Champagne), who’s discovered a Web site called “HNTD” (as in “hunted,” but without the vowels) in which young men can log on to seek out teenage girls, cruise them and score points depending on how far they get with them.

Then Shawn is injured during a practice session and he’s out for the season, forced to hobble around on crutches. At first Woodley and the other players still let him hang out with the team, but eventually they hold a party but declare it reserved for “starters only,” freezing out Shawn. Desperate for some silly adolescent reason to stay in these monsters’ good graces, Shawn figures out a way to score big in the game by donning a black hoodie (the first time I saw him put it on my immediate thought was, “Who is he going to kill?,” since Lifetime has made black hoodies the de rigueur garment for their murderers), sneaking around outside Lauren’s house and taking photos of her naked with his smartphone. There’s a nice little suspense scene in which he’s about to upload his pics to the Internet when his mom Lucinda (Tara Nicodemo) knocks on his door just as he’s about to hit the “send” button, and the intervention of his mother briefly makes him hesitate, but in the end he clicks on the control and sends the deadly photos to the Internet. Of course Lauren’s pics “go viral” around Westmoorland and she becomes the talk of the school in more ways than one. Shawn also makes a crude pass at Brooklynn (Devyn Nekoda), the school’s “fast girl,” and even though it’s later established that they’d already had sex together and he lost his virginity to her, she’s predictably put out at the unwanted attention. Lauren is so embarrassed at being the centerpiece of a school scandal that she attempts suicide with an overdose of drugs (probably her mom’s prescription meds), and Shawn’s mom, a professional firefighter, just happens to be on the crew that discovers her and rescues her in time.

An avuncular African-American police detective named Zeke (Eddie G) explains to Shawn’s mom Lucinda that since Lauren was underage, Shawn is looking at a multi-year prison sentence and permanent appearance on the sex offenders’ registry for “possession of child pornography.” Lucinda responds by taking the hard drive on which Shawn had stored Lauren’s images and ultimately destroying it so, as much as he’s deservedly suffering for his sins (among other things, Lauren won’t talk to him and the guys on the football team are pissed at him because their coach [Tim Progosh] benched all the starting players from the season’s last game, the one where all the college and NFL scouts were at, as collective punishment), at least he won’t get branded for life as a pedophile. What’s interesting about Friday Night Sext Scandal is we get the impression that there was a much more interesting and powerful movie available than the one they actually made: certainly I responded to the pathos of Shawn vainly attempting to maneuver on crutches with anything like his former grace and alacrity (I did enough caregiver work for people with disabilities to identify with him!), and it’s also noteworthy as a perhaps unwitting tale of just how unforgiving we’ve become as a society. Both Friday Night Sext Scandal and the next Lifetime movie, Killing for Extra Credit, made me glad that however rough my adolescence was, at least it didn’t take place in the era of the Internet and social media, where the kinds of stupid things young people frequently do take on an eternal life and live online even when you’re decades older and have long since grown out of them.