The Pregnancy Scheme (CMW Summer Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Friday, March 8) I watched an O.K. but pretty silly Lifetime movie called The Pregnancy Scheme, about a young career woman (a graphic designer) named Jules Simmons (Greta Carew-Johns) – though sometimes her friends call her “Julie” – who’s being chased in the prologue by an unidentified assailant wielding a baseball bat while wearing the obligatory black hoodie. Then we get to meet Jules outside mortal danger – there wasn’t Lifetime’s usual chyron explaining that this was a few months earlier but it obviously had to be – and find that she’s been hit with a triple whammy: she’s just been laid off from her job, her boyfriend Drew (Nick Preston, who looks like he’s going to grow up to be the sort of tall, lanky actor Lifetime likes to cast as their “nice” husbands) is leaving her, and she finds out she’s pregnant by him. Her long-time friend Celia “Cee” Balzarini (Amanda Wong – and no, writer Ansley Gordon, a woman, and casting director Ann Forry don’t bother to explain how a visibly Asian woman grew up in Italy and has an Italian last name; I guess we were meant to assume she was the product of an Italian father and an Asian mother) introduces her to Alana Powell (Ruth Bidner), a fellow student at a yoga class. (The scene at the class surprised me because it was co-ed; usually yoga classes in Lifetime movies have uni-sexual student bodies, though generally the teacher is a hot, studly male with a class of nubile young women with crushes on him.) Alana talks Jules, whose job loss has left her in such dire financial straits she’s getting eviction notices and warnings from the electric company that they’re about to cut off her service, while she’s also facing thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs for prenatal care since she no longer has a job and therefore doesn’t have health insurance anymore, into selling pregnancy tests.

The scam is there are a lot of women out there who will pay good money (the price we hear quoted is $2,000 per) for positive pregnancy tests they can pass off as their own in order to get their reluctant fiancés to marry them already. (One wonders how they’d explain to their new husbands several months later when no baby materializes, though previous Lifetime movies have depicted women who kidnapped genuine new mothers’ babies and killed the mothers.) Jules has qualms about doing this but desperately needs the money and keeps going along with it for a while, and when she tries to pull out of the operation with Alana, Alana threatens her and intimidates her into continuing. Jules finds herself being stalked not only by Alana but by a character identified only as “Man” (C. J. Wilkins), who confronts Jules at home and tells her how her scam ruined his life. He tricked with a woman named Sheila and meant it as a one-night stand, since he was already married and had kids, only Sheila used the false pregnancy test to blackmail him and, when he stopped paying her, “outed” him to his employer and his wife, so he got fired and his wife left him, took the kids and now won’t let him see them. Drew comes back into Jules’s life, but only to be with her during the pregnancy and co-parent their child (a daughter) – I was hoping writer Gordon would reunite them as a couple, but no-o-o-o-o – he’s already acquired a new girlfriend named Kristen, though we never see her and the only way Jules and we know she exists is Kristen’s name pops up on Drew’s cell phone. Jules is also put out when the woman she befriended at the hospital’s free birthing class, led by a woman who’s pregnant herself (Alyssa Mack-Lee), turns out to be someone other than who she pretended to be.

She introduced herself as “Bridget Wende” (Lauren Akemi Bradley) and said she’d gone to a sperm bank and got herself impregnated by a donor, but she’s really a reporter, Melissa Quinn, doing a story on the fake pregnancy-test scam. She also isn’t really pregnant but bought one of the commercially available appliances to fake it (we see her alone in her apartment taking the damned thing off after a hard day’s work). Drew “outs” her when he finds her true identity online and Jules spends a couple of acts moaning about how Bridget t/n Melissa lied to her to worm her way into Jules’s confidence. Jules also blows a job interview when she spots a woman at the firm (Barbara Patrick) who looks a lot like Alana and bolts the room, thinking it’s Alana stalking her again. Ultimately it ends up the way you expect it to, with Jules and Drew taking turns parenting their new baby girl, Melissa getting her Big Story into print and Alana getting arrested for various get-rich-quick schemes, which writer Gordon explains in a bizarre Christine Conradt-esque flashback. It seems that Alana had amassed a fair-sized bankroll but her husband took it all and blew it on a bad cryptocurrency investment (to my mind all cryptocurrency investments are bad, but we don’t need to go there), and this had given her a pathological hatred towards all men. Whenever a Lifetime writer trots out an explanation like this for a female villain’s villainy, I keep wondering, “Why doesn’t she just become a Lesbian?” (I’ve occasionally had the same question about so-called “incels” – “involuntary celibates,” men who get their psyches twisted into knots over the unwillingness of women to date them. It’s a pity we can’t just change our sexual orientations the way we change our clothes, because from the photos I’ve seen of some of the “incels,” maybe women aren’t interested in them but they’d do well in a Gay bar.) The Pregnancy Scheme is also one of those Lifetime movies in which the director, Ann Marie Fleming, actually seems quite capable – her suspense scenes showing Jules being stalked both by Alana and the mysterious “Man” whose life she inadvertently ruined are well done – but she’s at the mercy of a really stupid and far-fetched script!