It's all a gag, and it really is expertly done. Kudos to all concerned. It's a goof on every Lifetime movie ever made in particular, and on TV drama in general. Everybody plays it totally straight. There's no hipster attitude or ironic distance from the material; the entire cast plays along, even the little girl. It probably only took a week or so to film, so it looks like everybody had a fun time of it. Its tone-perfect re-creation is its greatest strength and its worst weakness. It's such an authentic Lifetime copy that it also includes the boredom and the flat, lifeless, soap-opera-like quality. Sitting through a real Lifetime movie is difficult work at times. Every possible Lifetime cliché is thrown in, nothing gets left out. Just in case someone might miss the joke, it helpfully adds the "Based On a True Story" claim at the beginning. Then at the end, we see the happy-ending epilogue ("Six Months Later"), where the family clumsily dances together to a fake, ersatz-rock song and uses wooden spoons as microphones. If anyone is looking to kill two hours, this flick will do the trick, just like any real Lifetime movie, but with the added subtext of some extremely subtle humor.
Review of A Deadly Adoption
A Deadly Adoption
(2015 TV Movie)
If you think this is a joke, young lady, it's in very poor taste!
22 June 2015
Warning: Spoilers