Tori Spelling and the Lifetime network grew up together

[TMC]

https://tv.avclub.com/tori-spelling-...her-1843970050

If reality TV had been a thing in the early ’90s, Tori Spelling’s reign as queen of the Lifetime movie may never have happened. Google her name, and page after page of tabloid headlines come up, each tied to a different talk show appearance or Tori-centric reality (or faux-reality) TV series. Many of the latter have punny names—So NoTORIous, Tori & Dean: Inn Love, Tori & Dean: STORIbook Weddings— all tied in to Spelling’s on-camera persona as someone who gets it. She knows that she’s never going to win any Academy Awards, so she’ll take criticism of her acting abilities with good humor—in public, at least. And she’s well aware that the only reason she’s famous is because her dad was a mega-rich, big-time TV producer in the ’70s and ’80s—even though, as she “candidly” reveals in interview after interview, she still has money problems, just like you!

But while Spelling will talk about her finances and her children and her husband all day long, one thing she doesn’t talk much about is her work in TV movies—which is odd, considering that they’ve become as much a part of her brand as Donna Martin on Beverly Hills, 90210. In fact, searching for interviews with Spelling on her career at the Lifetime network, most of what you’ll get are stories about how she cheated on her first husband with her second husband on the set of the 2005 Lifetime movie Mind Over Murder. And that’s frustrating, because the movie sounds totally bonkers—Spelling plays an assistant D.A. who gains psychic powers after getting hit by a car!—and has all but disappeared in the 15 years since its release, surviving only in the form of YouTube clips and, of course, those tabloid headlines.



The 2006 Entertainment Weekly interview “Tori Spelling Looks Back At Her Campy TV-Movie Career” is an exception, but even then Spelling’s calling the shots. Her comments are minimal, gracious, and ride the line between disarming honesty and coy denial with the skill of a practiced professional. “Audiences could never relate to me as anything other than Tori Spelling,” she says—very clear-eyed, very post-Paris Hilton—“but TV movies don’t have to be relatable, because you’re, like, being stalked with amnesia.” Oh, Tori! She’s just like us! Except she’s not!

Spelling made her first TV movie, Shooting Stars with Billy Dee Williams and Parker Stevenson, when she was 10 years old. But she didn’t really come into her own in the genre until 11 years later, when she was freed from the virginal constraints of 90210’s good girl Donna and allowed to play a real bitch in the 1994 NBC TV movie A Friend To Die For. The film is based on the real-life murder of Kirsten Costas, a popular cheerleader in Orinda, California, who was stabbed to death by a classmate 10 years earlier. That classmate in the movie is Angela (Kellie Martin, all hunched shoulders and dorky enthusiasm), whose obsession with queen bee Stacy (Spelling) culminates in a confrontation on a suburban front porch where Angela stabs Stacy with the vegetable knife her sister inexplicably left in the family car earlier in the film. Stacy’s apropos final words? “You are so weird! Go away!”



A juicy blend of bitchy teenage melodrama, true-crime scandal, and processed low-budget cheese, A Friend To Die For was a ratings hit when it aired on NBC as a Monday Night Movie following an episode of Blossom. Originally launched in the early ’60s as a volley in the cold war between film and TV—why go to a theater when you can watch new movies at home?—network made-for-TV movies had their campy heyday a few decades earlier, with preachy teen-tragedy fare like Linda Blair as Sarah T.- Portrait Of A Teenage Alcoholic (1975) and Desperate Lives (1982), a.k.a. the movie where a young Helen Hunt jumps out of a window while high on PCP. But by the mid-’90s, audiences were increasingly turning to cable networks for their TV-movie programming. NBC stopped airing its weekly Monday Night Movies in 1999; CBS was the last major network to abandon the practice, discontinuing original weekly made-for-TV-movies in 2006.

Along with what was then known as the Sci Fi Channel, the Lifetime network, which had rebranded from talk shows to a women’s-interest format in 1988, was on the forefront of this shift. Lifetime premiered its first original movie, Memories Of Murder, in July 1990, setting the soapy tone with Nancy Allen playing, as the network puts it, “a wife and stepmom who hits her head, gets amnesia, and forgets that a psychopath is trying to murder her family.” (Note that “wife and stepmom” are the operative descriptors for the character.) But the operation was still a fledgling one, so throughout the ’90s, Lifetime bought up the rights to network TV movies that fit its melodramatic, woman-centric brand to pad out its catalog. Once Lifetime got ahold of these films, it made them its own, renaming them with even more outrageous titles and replaying them so often that their primetime origins were all but forgotten.