Thw Wife Who Knew Too Much (Studio TF1 America, Greencorn Productions, Johnson Management Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 20) my husband Charles and I watched a pretty good thriller on Lifetime: The Wife Who Knew Too Much, a title clearly evocative of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (both versions: the 1934 masterpiece that “typed” Hitchcock as a suspense/thriller director for the rest of his career, and the leaden 1956 remake that seems to go on forever) even though it’s a completely different story. It’s set in Springfield, Arkansas and its central characters are Lisa Clarkson (Nicole Unger), wife of local high-school football coach Sam Clarkson (Matthew Pohlkamp), and Avery Downey (Tiffany Montgomery), single mother of the team’s star quarterback and captain, Mark Downey, who’s also dating Taylor Clarkson, Sam’s and Lisa’s daughter. Because imdb.com has only a skeletal page on this one (and even that didn’t go up until this morning!), I don’t know the names of the other cast members, and I only hastily scribbled down the names of the production companies, directors, writers, and other crew members. The director was Bennett Lasseter, who made a series of shorts between 2009 and 2015 and just one previous feature-length film for Hulu, The United Playlist of Noise, about a teenage boy named Marcus (Keean Johnson) who’s obsessed with music. Marcus is forced to undergo an operation in a month’s time that will render him deaf, and he determines to use the remaining month in which he can still hear by assembling “the ultimate playlist of noise.” The writers of The Wife Who Knew Too Much are Joseph Wilka (story) and Mark Lyons (script), though imdb.com’s skeletal page on this film credits Lasseter as writer as well as director.

The Wife Who Knew Too Much is one of those stories in which the death of a young high-school senior in a hit-and-run accident unravels everybody’s secrets, and Lisa Clarkson reaches out to Ruth Brinkman, mother of Kevin Brinkman, who died in the accident, to offer her moral support. Lisa also makes herself insufferable in her determination to find who caused the accident and bring them to justice despite the opposition of the townspeople, who make it clear they don’t want her digging up old bones and would just as soon the secrets stay secret. Lisa is proud of her role as a volunteer at Springfield High School and leader in the local PTA, only her relationship with the school principal, Mike Finnigan (tall, balding, and one of the African-American authority figures Lifetime likes to cast in its movies), gets edgier and edgier as she digs for the truth surrounding Kevin’s death. At one point Lisa confronts J. P. Reynolds, teammate of Mark Downey on the Springfield “Bulldogs” football team (their team song is, inevitably, “Who Let the Dogs Out?”), at Kevin’s wake demanding answers about Kevin’s death. J. P. evidently complains to his father, Tom Reynolds, because the next thing we hear is that Tom suddenly withdraws his proffered contribution to build a new school library. Finnigan angrily reassigns the task of making the presentation to Tom to reinstate his pledge to Avery, whom both Lisa and we have learned is having an affair with Lisa’s husband Sam. Sam is being scouted for a college football coaching job at a university in Ohio, contingent on his star player Mark Downey attending that college and joining its team. Lisa really doesn’t want to relocate, but Avery is fiercely ambitious and has set her sights on pulling Sam away from Lisa and making the four of them – Sam, Avery, Mark, and Taylor – one big happy family. Lisa traces the car involved in the hit-and-run to a local repair shop and wrecking garage called “Junk Yard Dog.”

She discovers a can of spray paint ostensibly used to vandalize Mark’s car by members of the rival Blue Jays football team, but Lisa realizes (and breaks into Junk Yard Dog’s garage to confirm) that Mark himself vandalized his own car because he was the hit-and-run driver who killed Kevin at the end of a long party during which he thought he had just hit a deer. The climax occurs at the big game of the season between the Bulldogs and the Blue Jays which will determine whether Sam gets his coaching job in Ohio and Mark goes on to an illustrious college football career and a shot at NFL stardom. The writing, which until then has been relatively subtle and literate by Lifetime standards, turns florid as Avery emerges as a full-fledged villain, who’s holding Sam’s and Lisa’s daughter Taylor as hostage and uses that to lure Sam to meet her in the administrative building behind the stadium. Avery’s plan is to make it look like Lisa herself was the hit-and-run driver who killed Kevin, and she means to kill Lisa and frame it to look like a guilt-driven suicide. The plot unravels when Mark, riven by guilt, refuses to play the final game – which is probably just as well because his traumas have virtually destroyed his passing skills – and instead decides to turn himself in. Police Detective Morrison, a compactly built African-American woman, shows up to arrest both Avery and Mark after Avery, thinking she’s stabbing Lisa, instead stabs Sam. In a “One Year Later” tag scene, we’re at the opening of the new school library (ya remember the new school library?), which has been built after all and is named after Kevin. Lisa and her daughter Taylor are at the ceremony and we’re told that Sam has left town and is futilely looking for a coaching career somewhere else, and Mark got a relatively light sentence (presumably for manslaughter) because ultimately he turned himself in. The Wife Who Knew Too Much is actually a quite well done thriller, no great shakes as a work of cinematic art but taut, well directed and reasonably well written until the last two acts, in which Wilky and Lyons suddenly turn Avery from a reasonable (if evil) character to a florid all-out Lifetime villainess.