Meredith McGeachie | Through the Shattered Lens

The year is 1978. A television producer named Garry Marshall (Daniel Roebuck) teaches America how to laugh again by casting Pam Dawber (Erinn Hayes) and a hyperactive stand-up comedian named Robin Williams (Chris Diamantopoulos) in a sitcom about an alien struggling to understand humanity. Despite constant network interference, the show makes Robin a star but, with stardom, comes all the usual temptations: lust, gluttony, greed, pride, envy, wrath, and John Belushi.

The Behind The Camera films, which all dramatized the behind the scenes drama of old television shows, were briefly a big thing in the mid-aughts. Because they were lousy, they never got good reviews but they did get good ratings from nostalgia-starved baby boomers and gen xers. I think The Unauthorized Mork & Mindy Story was the last one produced. It probably would have been better if there had been any sort of drama going on behind-the-scenes of Mork & Mindy but, according to this movie, everyone got along swimmingly. Williams may get hooked on cocaine but the film squarely puts the blame for that on John Belushi. The script, which was obviously written with one eye on avoiding getting sued, is sanitized of anything that could have reflected badly on anyone who was still alive when the movie aired.

Stuck with unenviable task of having to play one of the most famous people in the world, Chris Diamantopoulos was not terrible as Robin Williams. Considering how sanitized the script was, not terrible is probably the best that could be hoped for. There was not much of a physical resemblance but Diamantopoulos nailed the voice and some of the mannerisms. Erinn Hayes looks like Pam Dawber but, just as in the actual show, the movie gives her the short end of the stick and focuses on Williams.

For aficionados of bad television, this is mostly memorable for Daniel Roebuck’s absolutely terrible performance as Garry Marshall and a scene in which Williams is heckled in a comedy club but an overweight man who steps out of the shadows and announces that he’s John Belushi! Roebuck’s performance as Garry Marshall begins and end with his attempt to impersonate Marshall’s familiar voice. He was much better cast as Jay Leno in The Night Shift. As for Belushi , since he was not around to sue or otherwise defend himself, the movie goes all out to portray Belushi (who was played by Tyler Labine) as being an almost demonic influence on Williams. The film’s portrayal of Belushi is even worse and probably more inaccurate than Wired and that’s saying something!

To quote Mork himself: Shazbot! This movie is full of it.

(Lisa is currently in the process of trying to clean out her DVR by watching and reviewing all 40 of the movies that she recorded from the start of March to the end of June. She’s trying to get it all done by July 11th! Will she make it!? Keep visiting the site to find out!)

The 23rd film on my DVR was A Wife’s Suspicion.

I recorded this on May 23rd and, just like with Broken Promise, you can probably guess by the title alone that I recorded this off of Lifetime. In fact, when I first saw that I had recorded this movie, I went back and checked to make sure that I hadn’t already reviewed a Lifetime film called A Wife’s Suspicion. Seriously, you have to wonder how it could possibly taken until 2016 for Lifetime to use this title.

(In all fairness, before Lifetime picked it up, the movie’s title was Evidence of Truth. I’m actually glad that they changed the title, just because Evidence of Truth makes it sound like one of those tedious climate change documentaries that you sometimes come across on Netflix.)

Anyway, A Wife’s Suspicion is a mix of CSI procedural and Lifetime melodrama. Renee Murphy (Andrea Roth) is the type of forensic examiner who talks to corpses while she examines them. She’s stubborn but she gets results, dammit! She once dated Detective Kyle Ferguson (Sebastian Spence) but, after they broke up, she ended up married to Jack Murphy (Woody Jeffreys). Jack seems like he’s a great guy and he’s got impressive hair but women are being murdered and Renee has reason to suspect that Jack might be the murderer.

It doesn’t help, of course, that Jack has been keeping secrets from her. When she decides to follow him, Renee spots Jack talking to a younger woman. Could Jack be having an affair or is he telling the truth when he says that he’s simply the woman’s sponsor? It turns out that Jack has had issues with addiction in the past. That’s one of those things that he didn’t tell his wife because he wanted “a second chance” at life.

Does Renee give Jack that second chance or does she work with her ex-boyfriend to put him in prison? Decisions, decision….

When I mentioned that I was watching A Wife’s Suspicion, my Lifetime-watching friend Trevor asked me if the movie had bored me to tears yet. Well, the movie never quite brought tears to my eyes but I still quickly discovered what he was talking about. A Wife’s Suspicion moves slowly, largely because there’s barely enough plot for an hour-long cop show, much less a 90 minute movie. You’ll be able to guess whether Jack is guilty or not fairly early and the fact that you figured it out but Renee didn’t only serves to make Renee an annoying character.

Sadly, A Wife’s Suspicion is a film that I would recommend skipping.