Secret Life of the Dean's Wife (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 4) my husband Charles and I watched two Lifetime movies, Secret Life of the Dean’s Wife (the network’s Sunday “premiere”) and I Am Your Biggest Fan (the previous Saturday night’s “premiere”) that were actually better than average, even though neither of them aspired to the heights which Lifetime movies occasionally reach. Secret Life of the Dean’s Wife was directed by Joshua Butler and written by Gregory Cohen, and contrary to the impression you might have got from the similarity of the title to the recent Secrets of the Pastor’s Wife (2024), it’s the dean himself, Dr. Richard Collins (Don Jeanes), not his wife Margaret (Kate Watson), who’s engaging in extra-relational activity. The Collinses’ life gets upended when the small college at which they both work, Cloverdell University in California – he as the dean of the medical school and she as a teacher – hires as a journalism teacher Alex Carter (Matthew O’Donnell). Alex used to be Margaret’s boyfriend and journalism partner until she married Richard instead, and he never got over her either professionally or personally. Among the students in Alex’s journalism class are the Collins’ daughter Emily (Jenna Hogan). Those four characters are the only ones listed on the imdb.com Web site for the film along with the actors playing them, but there are at least four others of importance unidentified by cast members. One is Jessica Turner, who’s being mentored by Richard (as Charles would likely say, “Is that what they’re calling it now?”) and is also having an affair with him. She’s also spiraling out of control and using drugs, and she has at least two overdoses early on in the film.

She survives the first one, but when Margaret finds the key to her apartment in Richard’s belongings and goes there to comfort her and get her to stop having sex with Richard, she finds her unconscious on her floor, the victim of another overdose. Margaret starts to bring her back to consciousness and also calls 911, but by the time the police answer her call, she’s been knocked unconscious herself by a butch-looking figure in a hoodie and a full-face mask. When she’s revived by the police, Jessica is dead, the person in the hoodie and the mask is long gone (and we never actually find out who he was, much less what his motive was), and the cops initially suspect her of Jessica’s death. Alex Carter uses his own skills as an investigative reporter to dig up Richard’s secrets, and at one point he enlists Emily Collins as his research assistant. Meanwhile, Margaret Collins decides to dust off her own reportorial skills, and interviews another one of her husband’s former mentees, a Black woman named Sarah Lang, ostensibly for Cloverdell’s alumni magazine. She calls herself “Rebecca Spencer” and gets the interview, and Sarah says she had an affair with Richard but broke it off because he was “too controlling.” By this time we’re starting to suspect that Alex Carter may also be hiding secrets, and though Richard uncovers a report that he was fired from his last journalism job for “unethical conduct” (which could hide a multitude of sins, or non-sins), Alex gets the goods on Richard, including his history of affairs with students, and publishes them in a front-page article in the Cloverdell student newspaper. Richard’s boss, college president Charles (who’s something of a peripheral character in this, along with his wife Samantha), demands that Richard take a “leave of absence” until the scandal blows over.

We’re sure that Alex’s intentions are not honorable when he declares to Margaret that he, not Richard, is the right partner for her, especially when he reveals that he, not Richard, is Emily’s biological father. (I’d have marked that with a “spoiler alert” except it’s not that much of a spoiler, especially if you’ve seen more than about three Lifetime movies in your life.) The moment he starts mumbling about how he, Margaret and Emily “belong together,” we start thinking, “Margaret! He’s just as crazy as your husband! Get the hell away from him!” Only she can’t because Alex caps his campaign to win Margaret back by kidnaping Emily and keeping her whereabouts secret from her mom. Ultimately, first Richard and then the police find out where they are, Alex is arrested and Richard is removed from the action by a convenient deus ex machina in the form of a Doctors Without Borders-type organization that offers him a job abroad as soon as he resigns from Cloverdell. So hubby is removed from the action, Margaret has enough breathing room to decide for herself whether she wants to continue in a relationship with him or not, and Alex is presumably taken into custody. Charles wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen a previous Lifetime movie in which both the men in the heroine’s life were essentially villains, and the answer to the question both of us had had during the film – was Margaret the victim of a manipulative husband or a vengeful ex determined to get her back at all costs – was, “Both.” Secret Life of the Dean’s Wife was actually a well-done suspense thriller within the overall context of a Lifetime movie, and it was credibly cast. Kate Watson and Jenna Hogan look enough like mother and daughter they’re believable in those roles, while they’re different enough from both Emily’s putative dads it’s credible that the man we told through most of their movie is her father really isn’t. It was no great shakes as entertainment but it didn’t have the sorts of neck-snapping reversals that often afflict not only Lifetime movies but major-studio theatrical features as well.