Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1996’s When Friendship Kills!  It  can be viewed on YouTube!

After the divorce of her parents, Lexi Archer (Katie Wright) moves to Seattle with her mother (Lynda Carter).  Lexi is having a tough time adjusting to the divorce, especially since her father (Josh Taylor) is convinced that he’s a better parent than Lexi’s mother has ever been.  Still, Lexi is hoping to make a good impression at her new high school and she gets off to an effective start by not only winning a spot on the school’s volleyball team but by also becoming friends with the most popular girl in school, Jen Harnsberger (Marley Shelton).

The wealthy Jen is a straight-A student and a star volleyball player and she appears to have a very bright future ahead of her.  Jen not only shows Lexi around the high school but she also shows Jen that one way to eat without gaining weight is to throw up after every meal.  Jen is bulimic and soon, Lexi is anorexic.  Eventually, Lexi is collapsing on the volleyball court and Jen is angrily denying that she has a problem and the whole things leads to tragedy.

Obviously, eating disorders are a serious issue and When Friendship Kills is honest about not only the pressures that lead to so many girls and women developing body image issues but it also deals with the danger of having a relapse.  Growing up attending dance classes, I met and hung out with a lot of girls who had “tricks” for keeping their weight down and I recognized all of them in the characters of Jen and Lexi.  This film hits all of the usual plot points that we’ve come to expect from 90s films about eating disorders, from the volleyball coach saying that the already thin Lexi needs to lose weight to the scenes of Lexi staring in the mirror and seeing a distorted version of herself to Lexi’s father demanding that a feeding tube be used on his daughter, regardless of what Lexi’s mother might think.

That said, many viewers will find the most interesting thing about this movie to be that it features an early performance from Ryan Reynolds.  Reynolds plays the role of Ben, a friendly jock who asks Lexi out on a date.  Reynolds doesn’t do much in the film but he does show some hints of the amiable goofiness that would later become his trademark.  If one wanted to view this film as being a part of a Deadpool origin story, they certainly could.

As well, Lochlyn Munro also appears in the film!  It’s not really a melodramatic made-for-television movie unless Lochlyn Munro has a role.  In this particular film, Munro played a sleazy photographer who approached Jen and told her that she had the perfect look to be a model and invited her back to his studio.  Of course, when Jen brought Lexi to the studio with her, the photographer rather rudely announced that Lexi didn’t have the right look to be a model.  This led to Lexi refusing to eat and becoming hollow-eyed and skeletal and Katie Wright, it must be said, did a wonderful job portraying Lexi’s transformation from being hopeful to being haunted by her own self-image.  Marley Shelton did an equally good job of portraying Jen’s more cheerful style of self-destruction.

When Friendship Kills is an effective if predictable eating disorder film.  The film originally aired under the title A Secret Between Friends, which is a far more honest title than the over-the-top When Friendship Kills.  Friendship does not kill in this movie but self-starvation does.