If you don't watch Lifetime movies, this post is going to interest you zero.
Recently Lifetime unveiled a cheerleader-themed batch of movies. There were five. Off the top of my head, I believe they were called Undercover Cheerleader, Identity Theft of a Cheerleader (Maiara Walsh is AMAZING), The Wrong Cheerleader and two others that I will look up at the end of this post*. I watched three of these with my 13-year-old daughter as we bond over horror movies at the theater or ridiculous Lifetime movies at home.
ALL FIVE of these movies had these things in common:
1) They were about cheerleaders.
2) Each girl was new to a school after moving.
3) Each girl was being raised by a single mom (some were widows, some were divorced), and can we say daddy issues??
4) Being a cheerleader equated to instant popularity.
I think most of the girls ended up dating football players except one where the girl dated an older alumni guy... Cheerleader Escort, maybe?
Lifetime notoriously follows patterns with their movies. I make fun of Hallmark movies that follow the same formula: successful woman moves back to her hometown to help out with something and ends up falling in love with a guy who she went to high school with. I can't tolerate Hallmark movies. The level of cheese and gag-worthiness is too much.
I think those fans probably feel the same about my dear Lifetime movies. I once had the thought that people at the Lifetime headquarters have three bingo rolling machines. The first machine contains adjectives. The second machine contains nouns and the third machine contains a conflict. Every month someone runs the bingo machines and they assemble the regular casts (shout out to Josie David, Leslie Hope, Gail O'Grady, Josie Bissett, and Ashley Scott) to crank out the next "psycho" or "wrong" or "killer" or "babysitter" or "dad" or "mommy" movie.
The upcoming string of movies actually has a unique spin as they were all "ripped from the headlines." The only way I can convince my husband to watch Lifetime movies with me is if they are based on true events, so this is a big score for people like myself that are fascinated by kidnappings and "real" happenings. I definitely will NOT be watching the College Scandal one because that's just dumb.
In closing, as a highly educated woman that finds romance to be gross and cliche, I have no idea why I am so drawn in by the idea of a man that is stalking his new neighbor and has a dead ex-girlfriend in his backyard... or a couple that moves to suburbia because their daughter got in trouble at her last high school and develops a relationship with an abusive jock. I am captivated and my DVR will constantly be filled with these time-wasters.
*The last movie was The Secret Life of Cheerleaders- that memorable, huh?