The Stepdaughter (Footage Films Studios, Tubi, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 31) Lifetime showed a two-part, four-hour TV-movie, The Stepdaughter and The Stepdaughter 2, that was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen on the network. It was one of their “race” movies, in which all the principal characters were Black, and it’s about Joanna Lawrence, true name Maggie Dillon (Cassidey Fralin), who shows up one afternoon unannounced at the home of her biological father Michael (Blue Kimble) and his new wife, Whitney Hughs (Annie Ngosi Ilonzeh). The imdb.com cast list spells Whitney’s last name as the more normal “Hughes,” but “Hughs” is what we see on an online news story announcing their wedding. Whitney brought to the marriage her two sons by an earlier marriage that ended with the death of her husband, Brian, also known as “B.K.” (have it your way!) and Eric. The brothers are played by real-life brothers Akeem (Brian) and Jered (Eric) Cheatham – well, that’s one way to make sure your characters look biologically related: cast real biological relatives. It’s not clear what Michael does for a living, but Whitney has built a moderately successful cosmetics company catering to Black women and is ready to take it to the next level. She’s arranged for a meeting with executives from Walmart to see if they’ll carry her products in their stores, but Joanna sabotages the meeting by spiking Whitney’s cosmetics with lye, which literally burns the skin off of the faces of the two women Whitney had hired as models. She does a lot of other nasty things to the Lawrences as well as attempting to seduce both of Hughs’s sons (since they’re not biologically related and therefore it wouldn’t be incest in the literal sense) as well as their best friend, Dante Owens (Aaron Bryce Sheets). When Dante grabs Joanna’s private diary in a little black book (really!) and starts reading it, Joanna goes ballistic and beats him to death – though she somehow manages to conceal the crime even though it left blood all over the sheets. She’s somehow able to sneak the body out of the house and dump it off a bridge, though we don’t find this out until several acts later and in the meantime none of the other characters seem perturbed about Dante’s sudden disappearance.

Joanna also accepts Whitney’s invitation for a girls-only afternoon together during which they’ll go to a beauty parlor, but Whitney collapses during the outing under the influence of some powerful drugs with which someone has spiked her normal prescription medications. Through most of the film, co-written, co-produced and directed by Christopher B. Stokes, we’re unclear whether Joanna is just a teenage psychopath or something else is driving her. We do learn she had a singularly unhappy childhood, losing her mother when she was 10 and losing her grandmother more recently – it was grandma’s death in Louisiana that propelled her to cross the country and turn up in Orange County, California to seek out her dad – so for a while we’re not sure whether we’re supposed to hate her or feel sorry for her and the awful background she endured that has made her a monster. It’s only in the last act that we learn [spoiler alert!] that Michael, her father, is in on her game; the two of them are con artists. Michael seeks out well-to-do Black women he can marry so he can grab their fortunes and then kill them, sort of like Henri Verdoux in Charlie Chaplin’s pioneering black comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and collect their inheritances and/or get life insurance payouts on them. Only [double spoiler alert!] Joanna, whose real name is Maggie Dillon, learns that Michael actually killed her mother by spiking her meds with the same “cocktail” of cocaine and two other dangerous drugs Joanna later used on Whitney, so she turns against him and they’re about ready to kill each other when Whitney grabs a gun one of them has left on the floor during their big confrontation and shoots Michael in the back. Episode one ends with both Michael and Joanna in police custody, and Whitney’s sister Cassandra (Judi Johnson) and police officer brother-in-law Terrance Clark (Rayan Lawrence) – the only two sympathetic people in the entire story – take custody of Brian and Eric after Whitney is adjudged an unfit mother because cocaine and other drugs were found in Whitney’s system after she allegedly tried to kill herself. Of course, it was all Joanna’s fault – she gave Whitney the incapacitating drugs and slashed her wrists to make it look like she’d tried to kill herself, and she also gave tranquilizing injections to both Cassandra and Terrance so they wouldn’t interfere with her plans to kill both Michael and Whitney to grab the Hughs inheritance for herself.