The Lifetime-a-Fication of Netflix

You all know me. I spend a lot of time in front of screens, and I watch a lot of really trashy nonsense. When Netflix dropped a movie called Amish Stud, I had to see what that was all about. I was hoping for something silly like Hot Frosty. What I got was a poorly written, Lifetime TV movie about a true crime. Not the vibe I was hoping for.

Luke Macfarlane (Killjoys, Bros) stars as Eli Weaver, an Amish man who never got over rumspringa. He had a secret cell phone and accounts on dating sites under the username “Amish Stud.” I’m never going to get over the fact that he got dates with multiple women using that name. The dating scene near Apple Creek, Ohio, must have been bleak in the early 2000s for that to have worked out as well as it did. Because, despite Macfarlane’s comely appearance, Weaver was not that good-looking.

Not only did he convince women to date him, Weaver may have also convinced a woman to kill his wife and the mother of his five children. Kirsten Vangsness plays Barbara Raber without any of the glam or flair of her Criminal Minds character, Penelope Garcia. Raber said she was convinced to help Weaver in part because she was in love with him, and he told her they could be together if his wife were dead. She was convicted of murder, while he pleaded to a lesser charge of conspiracy to murder. Now that’s love.

This was a tragic crime, and someone made a terrible movie about it. Why is it on Netflix, though? Sure, Netflix started as a wacky mail-order DVD rental service. In those first couple of years, I definitely settled on watching a lot of poorly produced documentaries and B-movies while I waited for good movies to become available. Do you remember their wait list? Where you could see how close you were to getting that good movie in the mail? Simpler times, people. Simpler times. But since 2019, Netflix has racked up 173 Oscar nominations and 24 wins across multiple projects and categories as a production company. Netflix doesn’t need to serve trash anymore! And yes, that also includes things like Hot Frosty. I am aware that I am part of the problem.

Last week, Netflix’s Top 10 list included The Rip and KPop Demon Hunters alongside Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story which was produced in 2023 for Lifetime Network, Suitcase Killer: The Melanie McGuire Story which was produced for Lifetime Network in 2022, and several other movies that look cut from the same cloth. When did this Lifetime-a-fication of Netflix happen?

Lifetime Network, owned by A&E Global Media, began licensing movies to Netflix sometime around 2015. That was a good year for series on Netflix, but not a great one for movies. Maybe we didn’t notice Lifetime creeping in. Or maybe we did, but we didn’t write any articles about it. I don’t know. Regardless, the game changed in 2018 when Netflix acquired Season 1 of the psychological thriller series, You, from Lifetime. Its first season hadn’t done very well on the cable network, but it went over like gangbusters on Netflix. It did so well that Netflix saved You from cancellation over on Lifetime and converted it into one of their original series.

Shortly after that, the COVID-19 pandemic had us all locked in our houses, captive audiences for streaming services. The content floodgates opened, and anything that could be streamed was. Our hunger for home entertainment grew in parallel with our hunger for more comforting entertainment. The world has been on fire. We were not as bloodthirsty as we were when The Walking Dead started in 2010, and we craved something more cozy to distract us from everyday life. You can see this reflected in the popularity of shows like Murder In A Small Town, Elsbeth, High Potential, and the rise of Lifetime and Lifetime-esque content on Netflix.

Unfortunately, as much fun as we get from … not “hate watching” … maybe it’s more like “ridicule watching,” or “mock watching” all of the silly holiday movies Netflix produces, it really emboldens them to push more of this garbage on us. After all of my holiday movie reviewing, my algorithms have been toast. I been getting recommendations for Lacey Chabert movies, and something called A Tourist’s Guide To Love. Amish Stud movie shows up under the “More Like This” for Under The Silver Lake and Adolescence. But don’t be fooled. These things have nothing in common except that Netflix wants to inflate viewership numbers.

If Netflix seems overrun by old Lifetime Network slop, you’re not imagining it. You’re going to need to train your algorithm to stop showing it to you. When Netflix integrates all of the Warner Bros assets, maybe it will bury all of the Lifetime movies in an avalanche of DCU movies and episodes of old TNT series.