Retro Television Review: St. Elsewhere 2.19 “The Women”

Posted on October 10, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988. The show can be found on Hulu and, for purchase, on Prime!

This week, St. Elsewhere tries something different.

Episode 2.19 “The Women”

(Dir by Bruce Paltrow, originally aired on March 28th, 1984)

Four women share a room at St. Eligius.

Evelyn Milbourne (Eva La Galliene) is elderly, headstrong, and rich. She’s also about to lose her independence as it’s clear that she can no longer live on her own.

Rose Orso (Brenda Vacarro) is only in her 40s but is already showing signs of dementia. She struggles to remember who she is. Her husband is becoming a stranger. At one point, she grabs some scissors. At first, it seems like she might be planning on attacking one of the other women. Instead, she cuts her hair and doesn’t do a very good job of it.

Paige (Blythe Danner) is in for a nose job and she tells a lot of stories about her glamorous life outside of the hospital. Towards the end of the episode, she confesses that she’s actually a pathological liar who got her nose job because she didn’t have anything better to do.

The fourth woman never speaks. She’s in a coma. She dies in the middle of the night and is rolled out of the room with disturbing efficiency.

This episode was basically a play. A few of the regulars got scenes of their own but, for the most part, the action stayed in that one hotel room and it focused on the four women. When I first realized what this episode was going to be like, I really thought I was going to hate it. It seemed like the sort of thing that would bring out the worst in the show’s writers. Instead, it turned out to be a very well-done and extremely well-acted episode, one that reminded the viewer that every patient has their own story. After spending most of this season focusing on the doctors, The Women announced that the patients matter too.

Guilty Pleasure No. 79: Kate’s Secret (dir by Arthur Allan Seidelman)

Posted on April 1, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In this 1986 melodrama, Kate (Meredith Baxter) has a secret. She may look like healthy and young and blonde. She may have a beautiful house and a handsome husband (Ben Masters). She and her fitness instructor best friend (Shari Belafonte) may spend their time making fun of how fat everyone else. But deep down, Kate is convinced that she’s overweight. She gets on the scale and that declaration of 120 pounds feels like a slap in the face.

How does Kate lose weight? She exercises frequently. And she spends a lot of time staring at herself in the mirror, as if trying to mentally burn away the pounds. Mostly, though, Kate just binges on food whenever she gets stressed and then she throws up. Kate has a lot of reasons to be stressed and they are almost entirely due to her mother (Georgann Johnson), who rarely has a nice word to say to Kate and who constantly tells Kate that she’s going to lose her husband to his assistant (Leslie Bevis).

(Who does everyone always assume that assistants are going to be homewreckers?)

Now, to be clear, eating disorders are a serious thing. I know more than a few people who have had eating disorders. During my first semester of college, I got very used to the sound of the girl in the room next to mine throwing up every morning. There’s nothing funny about the idea of someone having an eating disorder. However, there is something funny about an overwritten movie about an eating disorder that features Meredith Baxter literally attacking a chocolate cake then blaming the mess in the kitchen on the dogs. This is one of those well-intentioned programs that takes a real problem and then goes so overboard in portraying it that it’s more likely to make you snicker than feel horrified. You might not feel good about laughing but the crazed look in Meredith Baxter’s cake-filled eyes will make it difficult not to. Hence, the term guilty pleasure.

As always happens in these type of movies, Kate ends up in a treatment center where a doctor (Edward Asner) tries to reach her and the other patients are all either extremely nice or extremely rude. Kate’s roommate (Tracy Nelson) is a model with anorexia. Another patient (Mindy Seeger) harps on Kate’s “perfect life.” Meanwhile, poor Deyna (Mackenzie Phillips) freaks out when someone moves the garbage can. It’s all very well-meaning but also very over-written and overacted to the point that, once again, it’s more likely to illicit a guilty laugh than anything else.

In the end, Kate realizes that it’s all her mother’s fault. That was kind of obvious from the first time her mother told Kate that her husband was obviously planning on leaving her. “I’m getting better,” Kate says as the credits roll. Yay, Kate!

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Lifetime Movie Review: The Wrong Life Coach (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2024’s The Wrong Life Coach, Morgan Bradley stars as Jordan Roberts, whose popularity as a high school cheerleader did little to prepare her for the pressures of adult life. Her career is going nowhere. Her boss (Vivica A. Fox) does not respect her. Her boyfriend (Hector David, Jr.) is bored with her and their vanilla sex life. Her mother (Tracy Nelson) is living with her and trying to control her life. Jordan needs someone to help her get her life together. She needs a life coach!

(Personally, I’ve never gotten the whole life coach thing but whatever. Apparently, it works for some people.)

A chance meeting with Liz Kimble (Allison McAtee) changes Jordan’s life. Though Jordan doesn’t really remember her, she and Liz went to high school together. And it turns out that Liz is now a life coach! Soon, Liz is encouraging Jordan to take sexy pictures, demand more from her career, and to stand up to her domineering mother!

At first, it all seems perfect. Except …. Liz is not a certified life coach! She’s just repeating a bunch of stuff that she heard from her own life coach, Rhonda (Meredith Thomas). It may sound like the start of a hilarious comedy but it turns out that Liz is a little bit crazy. Liz has never gotten over losing her spot on the cheerleading squad to Jordan and now, she’s determined to get revenge,

In quick order, Jordan loses her job, her relationship with her mother, and nearly her boyfriend as well! Plus, her best friend has gone missing! After Jordan tells Liz to get lost, Liz begins to obsessively stalk Jordan. What Jordan doesn’t know is that Liz has placed hidden cameras all over her house and she’s even hacked into Jordan’s email. Jordan thinks that she’s had a good job interview with Mr. Gordon. (Hey, it’s Eric Roberts!) But remember those lingerie-clad photos that Liz encouraged Jordan to send to her boyfriend? Well, those pictures end up getting sent to Mr. Gordon as well.

“I couldn’t hire you if I wanted to,” Mr. Gordon says. When even Eric Roberts refuses to work with you, you know you’ve asked the wrong person for advice!

“Girl, you listened the wrong life coach.”

She sure did!

I love the Lifetime “Wrong” films. The Wrong Life Coach is a tremendous amount of fun, from Allison McAtee’s over-the-top performance as Liz to the side-eye that Vivica A. Fox gives Jordan every time she makes a mistake. As always, with the “Wrong” films, director David DeCoteau fully embraces the melodrama and creates a film that’s so ludicrous that you can’t help but love it. Any director could make a film about a crazy life coach. But only David DeCoteau has the courage to have that life coach make her diabolical plans while wearing her old high school cheerleader uniform.

Watching this film reminded me of how much I love Lifetime and its demented films. I look forward to reviewing a lot more of them in 2025!

Hopefully, more than a few of them will feature Eric Roberts!

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

A Blast From The Past: The Drug Knot (dir by Anson Williams)

Posted on October 18, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1986’s The Drug Knot, Dermot Mulroney plays a high school student.

At the time this show aired, Dermot Mulroney was 25 years-old and he looked like he was 30 but, looks aside, he actually gives a pretty convincing performance as Doug Dawson. Doug is a smart and musically-gifted high school senior. He’s talented enough to make beautiful music with a saxophone and rebellious enough to skip class so that he can play the sax in the school locker room. His girlfriend, Kim (Meryl Streep look-alike Kim Myers), is totally in love with Doug but she also worries that he’s getting too heavily into dugs. He’s gone from smoking weed to snorting cocaine. He hides his drugs in his bedroom. His mother (Mary Ellen Trainor) has no idea that Doug is a drug addict while Doug’s little brother (David Faustino) wants to be just like him.

Can you see where this is heading?

In order to combat the school’s growing drug problem, the school has invited a speaker named David Toma to give a speech at a school assembly. Toma is a former cop who struggled with addiction himself. He inspired not one but two television shows, one called Toma and the other called Baretta. He goes from school to school and he gives speeches about all of the teenagers that he knows who have died as a result of doing drugs. As we see throughout the episode, Toma is a confrontational speaker, one who is not afraid to yell at his audience. Doug shows up for the assembly but his bad attitude leads to Toma kicking him out.

Personally, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the idea of trying to change people’s behavior by yelling at them. I know that it’s a popular technique and there’s been a lot of television shows (Intervention and Beyond Scared Straight come to mind) that are all about getting in people’s faces and screaming at them. My feeling, though, has always been that this approach is more about making other people feel good than actually changing behavior. Everyone wants to see the people who have caused them stress get yelled at. On talk shows, audiences would applaud whenever a disrespectful teen got sent to boot camp but it’s rare that you ever heard about whether or not the approach actually worked. I mean, I assume the approach works for some people but I know that if someone yells at me not to do something, my usual reaction is to go ahead do it just because I resent authority. David Toma’s approach would not have worked with me.

(One interesting thing about The Drug Knot is that David Toma is a real person and he plays himself. Apparently, he’s still out there and still at it, even though he’s in his 90s now. I should note that, on YouTube, there’s a lot of comments from people who say that getting yelled at by David Toma saved their lives so maybe the yelling approach does work for more people than I assumed.)

Anyway, as always when it comes to these made-for-TV anti-drug programs, the drugs lead to tragedy and The Drug Knot ends on a particular dark note. For once, there is no redemption.

Here is The Drug Knot, complete with an anti-drug message from Michael Jordan:

Lifetime Film Review: The Wrong Boy Next Door (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on July 13, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Don’t trust your neighbor,” proclaims the tagline for The Wrong Boy Next Door and that’s certainly true when it comes to Lifetime films.

Seriously, in a Lifetime movie, your neighbor is either going to be a seemingly nice woman who is going to end up trying to steal your baby or else a really hot guy who never wears a shirt and who is secretly plotting to kill you and your friends. In the case of The Wrong Boy Next Door, we get the hot psycho who is always wandering outside without a shirt on. John (Travis Burns) may be intriguing but he’s also dangerous. It might be fun to watch him while he’s out in his garage but if he starts watching you back …. look out!

The Wrong Boy Next Door really does capture an essential truth. Bad boys are sexy and the more dangerous the better. While watching the film, it was easy for me to yell that Katie (played by Calli Taylor) was making a huge mistake by trusting John but, honestly, I probably would have made the same mistake back when I was in high school. First off, there’s the fantasy of being the one girl who can reform a bad boy. Secondly, there’s the fact that, when you’re a teenager, you do stupid things because you think you’re smarter than you actually are. I mean, really, that’s the whole appeal of being young. It’s the only time in your life that you can get away with being totally dumb and irresponsible. That’s why there are people in their 30s who are already feeling nostalgic for high school.

Having watched the film, I can say that Katie is one of the greatest Lifetime heroines ever. From the minute the movie starts, she’s getting in trouble. First, she gets caught vaping at school and this leads to her being suspended for a few days. It’s during that time that she first spots John walking around outside. She invites him inside and, two minutes later, they’re kissing. Then, when Katie returns to school, one of her teachers spots her checking her phone in class. When the teacher demands the phone, Katie throws it at her and literally knocks the teacher to the ground! (The school’s principal later says that the teacher looks like she got hit in the face by a baseball.) Go Katie!

So now, Katie’s under house arrest! That means that she has to wear one of those ankle bracelets that beeps if you leave your front yard. The detective in charge of Katie’s house arrest is played by none other than Vivica A. Fox so you know that if Katie breaks the rules, she’s going to be in a lot of trouble. Unfortunately, being stuck in her house is kind of a problem because Katie suspects that John might be as good a guy as he’s pretending to be. But how can she investigate without going outside!?

The Wrong Boy Next Door was a hell of a lot of fun, largely due to Calli Taylor’s energetic and sympathetic performance as Katie and Travis Burns’s menacing turn as John. As is typical of Lifetime’s “Wrong” films, director David DeCoteau kept the action moving at a brisk pace and Vivica A. Fox brought her usual flair to yet another no-nonsense authority figure. All in all, The Wrong Boy Next Door is one for which to keep an eye out.

Lifetime Film Review: The Wrong Stepmother (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on July 6, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“I hear that Maddie is one bad mother….”

“Shut your mouth!”

“But I’m talking about Maddie.”

“Then we can dig it!”

Actually, Maddie (Cindy Busby) is not a mother, though she would like to be. She not even a stepmother, despite what the title says. Instead, she’s just dating the recently widowed Michael (Corin Nemec). If she does end up marrying Michael, Maddie will become a stepmother — perhaps even a WRONG stepmother — to his two daughters, Lilly (Calli Taylor) and Nicole (McKinley Blehm).

It doesn’t take Lilly long to realize that there’s something off about Maddie. For one thing, she catches Maddie trying to check her social media. Then she overhears Maddie claiming to be her mother. And finally, Maddie changes up Lilly’s college admission essay. See, Lilly wrote about how much her late mother influenced her. Maddie, however, changes it into an essay about how much Lilly loves her future stepmother.

Yes, Maddie has some issues. As we discover at the start of the film, she has a history of stalking people. About halfway through the film, she murders two people. Whenever you’re watching a film on Lifetime, you know someone’s going to get murdered at exactly halfway through the film. You can set the time by it.

As with all of Lifetime’s “Wrong” films, Vivica A. Fox has a small role. In this one, she plays Ms. Price, the high school guidance counselor who is extremely unimpressed by Lilly’s college admissions essay. When Ms. Price confronts Lilly about how unimpressive her essay was, Fox delivers the lines with such subtle fury and annoyance that it brought back a lot of high school memories for me. As played by Fox, Ms. Price is the type of high school counselor who scares you to death but who also changes your life for the better. If Ms. Price had been my counselor, I definitely wouldn’t have spent so much time skipping class and shoplifting makeup at Target.

Anyway, the main complaint that you always hear about Lifetime films is that they’re all exactly the same but that’s actually their appeal. They’re fun to watch, precisely because 1) they’re predictable and 2) the viewer is always going to be smarter than the people in the movie. I mean, we can take one look at Maddie and say, “Okay, don’t let her in the house.” However, Michael’s not that smart and, if he was, we really wouldn’t have a movie. Sometimes, you just have to stop crying about plausibility and enjoy what you’re watching.

The Wrong Stepmother gets a big boost from the casting of the always likable Corin Nemec as Michael. I mean, it’s pretty much impossible not to root for a character played by Corin Nemec, even if that character is way too trusting of someone who he met on a dating app. Meanwhile, Cindy Busby is properly psychotic as Maddie and, of course, you’ve got Vivica A. Fox changing lives as Ms. Price.

The Wrong Stepmother is an entertaining Lifetime film. Watch it with your snarkiest friends.

Cleaning Out The DVR, Again #40: The Wrong Child (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(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 the end of July 11th! Will she make it!? Well, I guess she did since this is the 40th review!!! YAY!)

Finally, we have reached the end. Two and a half weeks ago, I started the process of reviewing all forty of the films that I recorded between the start of March and the end of June. It hasn’t always been easy, within the two and a half week time frame that I set for myself, to watch and review all of these films but I’ve managed to do it. As soon as I publish the review that you’re reading right now, I will be able to say that I have officially cleaned out my DVR.

So, what was the final film waiting to be watched on my DVR? It was The Wrong Child, which originally aired on June 26th on the Lifetime channel.

In The Wrong Child, Vivica A. Fox plays Renee. Like many Lifetime heroines, Renee would appear to have it all. She has money, glamour, a teenage daughter, and a tragic backstory. (Her first husband was killed several years ago in a traffic accident.) She also has a wonderful house, which regular Lifetime viewers might recognize as being the same house from The Wrong Roommate. She has recently remarried. Her new husband is Charles (Gary Daniels), an architect who may or may not have a few secrets of his own lurking in the past.

One day, Andrew (Robbie Davidson) shows up at the house. Andrew is a handsome and apparently normal teenager. He explains that his mother has recently died of stomach cancer but, before she passed, she informed him that Charles is his father. Charles is skeptical but Renee and her daughter welcome Andrew into the family.

Of course, it turns out that Charles was correct to be suspicious. Andrew is a sociopath, the type of guy who takes pictures of strangers while they’re out jogging and who also is totally willing to murder anyone who might have any evidence that his name is not actually Andrew. Andrew may be crazy but he has a very specific reason for tracking down Charles and his new family.

The Wrong Child is a pretty standard Lifetime B-movie but director David DeCoteau always brings a certain flair to even the most predictable of thrillers. You know that Andrew is crazy as soon as you see him but Robbie Davidson still gives a really good and rather chilling performance.

Add to that, there’s the house! I loved the house when it appeared in The Wrong Roommate and I loved it even more in The Wrong Child. Here’s hoping that the house appears in another wrong film soon!

Well, that’s it! Two and a half week and 40 movies later, I have now officially cleaned out my DVR! Now, I can get to work on filling it up again!

What Lisa Watched Last Night #146: A Fatal Obsession (dir by James Camali)

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, I watched the premiere of A Fatal Obsession on the Lifetime Movie Network!

Why Was I Watching It?

So, for the past month, Lifetime has exclusively been showing holiday movies. And don’t get me wrong — I love the holidays, I enjoy holiday movies, and I’m certainly not complaining. I can understand why Lifetime has made the programming choice that they have and, during this week, keep an eye out for my reviews of all of those Lifetime Christmas movies. But, at the same time, I have been missing the melodrama that made Lifetime famous. So, when I saw that the Lifetime Movie Network would be premiering a movie that had nothing to do with Santa Claus, I simply had to watch!

What Was It About?

Michael Ryan (Eric Roberts) is a horror author who is not just famous for giving his readers nightmares. He’s also famous for being a recovering alcoholic. Except, he’s not really in recovery. Instead, he’s still drinking, he’s still violent, and he’s still dangerous abusive. When his wife, photographer Christie (Tracy Nelson), and teenage daughter, Miri (Remington Moses) finally leave him, Michael spirals into madness. Soon, Michael has vanished and Christie’s best friend turns up dead.

Could Michael still be out there, trying to track down his wife and daughter? He could be. Then again, Christie and Miri have met a lot of other strange characters since starting their new life. Their neighbors, Ben (George Saunders) and his sullen son, Kyle (Colin Chase), seem to be a little bit off. And then, of course, there’s Harrison (David Winning), the aspiring actor who has hired Christie to take his headshots….

What Worked?

Oh my God, this is one of the most melodramatic, over-the-top, implausible films that I’ve ever seen so, of course, I had to love it. Improbable plot twists? Gloating villains? Forbidden love? Questionable life choices? This film had it all and thank the television Gods for that!

I also really liked the look of the film. The snowy and overcast images were wonderfully chilly and atmospheric, giving the entire movie a dream-like atmosphere.

And, on top of all that, you had Eric Roberts doing his Eric Roberts thing. Roberts is such an eccentric actor that he’s always interesting to watch, regardless of the role. And he actually did a pretty good job, creating a frighteningly plausible portrait of a serial abuser.

What Did Not Work?

It all worked.

“Oh my God! Just like me!” Moments

Naturally, I related to the character of Meri, the intelligent but rebellious daughter who was struggling to deal with all the ugliness around her. Remington Moses did a good job and was believable in her struggle to deal with her family’s legacy of abuse.

Lessons Learned

Just because your paranoid, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t out to get you.