An hour into Lifetime’s movie The College Admissions Scandal, my screen went black. At first, I thought that last scene was just the end, or close to it – Danny (Sam Duke), a white high school kid in Los Angeles whose parents bought his way into Stanford, discovers their doctored picture of him sailing (for he is now, unbeknownst to him, a sailing recruit), then begs his friend (who also wants Stanford, and is not a double legacy, and is also not white) to believe him. He didn’t know, he cries. This movie had already seemed to posit Danny, with his stifled music ambitions and parents who keep track of his algebra III tests, as the real victim of the story, so it seemed like a possible-enough ending. It certainly felt like I’d been watching for enough time.
Actually, my internet had just cut out. I rebooted and clicked where I thought I was in the timeline – the far end – only to realize I had fully a third of the movie left. Both my friend and I exclaimed “that CANNOT be right”, and that is the most telling and confounding thing I can say about a movie on one of the buzziest, schadenfreude-y and generally outrageous scandals of the year.
Yes, this year. Operation Varsity Blues – the FBI sting which exposed a conspiracy of coaches, SAT proctors, and parents to purchase spots at elite colleges to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars – only came to light seven months ago. That Lifetime turned around a movie this quickly is genuinely impressive, and evidence of the public’s insatiable appetite for a scandal that makes the very rich look fallible, exposes the elite college racket for what it is, and produces innumerable jokes at Aunt Becky’s expense. There will almost certainly be an audience for this – the behind-the-scenes treatment of the open-kitchen conversations and delusions the federal complaint captured to spectacular effect – which makes the movie’s dullness all the more baffling.
In part, that’s because the movie totally ignores (perhaps for legal reasons) one of the most fascinating elements of Operation Varsity Blues: its overlap of brazen entitlement and actual fame. Varsity Blues implicated the Hollywood actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin, whose daughter, the Instagram influencer Olivia Jade, was widely mocked for her posts about having no interest in school. The Lifetime movie, however, avoids all of this fodder, instead focusing on two families, names changed, so desperate to “do anything to help my kid” that it includes paying Rick Singer (name not changed), a college fixer, to guarantee admission. Caroline Devere (Penelope Ann Miller), an interior designer, is supposed to be the more sympathetic figure, so wrapped into the cult of elite schools that she crosses the ethical Rubicon for Danny, who just wants to wait tables and play in bars. Meanwhile, Bethany Slade (Mia Kirshner), pitched as the compulsively watchable Machiavellian figure, forks over $500,000 to Singer to get her daughter Emma (Sarah Dugdale) into Yale.
Look, I’m not here to criticize the quality of “a Lifetime movie”, of which I have admittedly seen few. The genre has its role and its appeal – a quick hit of emotion with little investment, a peek-behind-the-curtain take on drama more fascinating than we want to admit. Its cardinal sin is not bad cinematography, but being deathly boring. It is supposed to be entertaining, and provide through that entertainment a new angle on scandal – catharsis through adjacency to the most extreme emotions or situations one could feel. The movie has bribes, family blowouts and late-night criminal strategizing, and yet none of it feels fresh or even guiltily enjoyable. The real coverage is far more fascinating.
To be fair, it has its so-bad-it’s-good (or maybe offensive?) moments. Bethany – a Blair Waldorf figure, if Blair Waldorf failed to account for FBI wiretaps – justifies looping Emma into the scam by invoking social Darwinism. Caroline admires how she can write off the bribe as a donation to underserved children. Danny angrily runs up a wooded hill in ripped black skinny jeans and flings himself to the ground in disgust, which is unintentionally hilarious. Emma’s boyfriend, a freshman at Yale, is absolutely not a freshman in college, but he does get to say the line: “This calls for Pimm’s cup the second I get back!”
These moments are genuinely enjoyable, in a cheap, cringe-y way. But they can’t transcend a movie that focuses on the parents – time that inevitably sympathizes with their desperation even as it’s supposedly mining their folly for entertainment. Bethany’s no-fucks-given warpath is supposed to be condemnable, but she’s also still the star.
Still, it’s a lot of thought for a movie that is, frankly, not that interesting, and perhaps never would be. The college admissions scandal was so galling, jammed so hard on the hot buttons of race and class and opportunity in America, that it was probably never going to fit in the frame of a Lifetime movie. By genre, it’s going to go for the titillating, the flashy, the voyeuristically compelling. There’s plenty of that in the real Varsity Blues scandal, but not in this movie.
The College Admissions Scandal premieres on Lifetime in the US on 12 October with a UK date yet to be announced
