Lifetime

Critics are raving that the film is finger-licking good.

Looks like we won’t have to wait until The Crown Season 10 to see Prince Harry and Meghan Markle walking down the aisle. Perhaps even before the real royals hold their wedding, Lifetime is already interested in telling Harry and Meghan’s story with their signature schmaltz.

We haven’t yet seen if UnREAL can rebound from the misstep of Season 2, but an already-ordered fourth season is now making fans nervous. Long before Season 3 even premieres, Lifetime has decided to pull back its episode order for the fourth year.

We’ll have to wait until 2018 to find out if UnREAL can bounce back from its steep Season 2 decline, but Lifetime certainly has faith. The Shiri Appleby-Constance Zimmer reality drama will continue to push fake TV boundaries through a fourth season.

The third season of UnREAL has quite a bit riding on it after the disaster of Season 2, and Lifetime isn’t taking any chances. The once-breakout reality drama has officially pushed back Season 3 to 2018, leaving the whole of this year in Everlasting wait.

There’s only one thing weirder than a biopic about an artist who’s still alive, and that’s a biopic about an artist who’s still alive and wants nothing to do with said biopic and has in fact disowned it completely. That’s Britney Ever After, Lifetime’s (naturally) drama about pop artist Britney Spears’ career and fall to “rock bottom.”

The missteps of UnREAL Season 2 guaranteed that Lifetime would take a more cautious approach in Season 3, and the switch to a Bachelorette-type format is already off and running. We’ve officially found our next Everlasting star, now that Masters of Sex alum Caitlin Fitzgerald has signed on as the new leading star.

In psychology, there is a concept called the uncanny valley, which refers to that creepy feeling you get when you see something that looks almost just like a person’s face, but not quite. This also applies to celebrity biopics. When you watch a movie about someone you’ve seen pictures of all over the place for your entire life, and the actor playing that person looks almost just like that person, but not quite, you get the same creepy feeling. That feeling abounds in these new images from Lifetime’s Britney Spears movie, tentatively titled Britney.

Off the rails as Season 2 of Lifetime’s breakout UnREAL went, the initial attempt at exploring racial politics with an African-American Everlasting suitor was well-received. Season 3 has its own issues behind the scenes, but will again attempt to change the conversation of reality TV, this time switching genders with a female suitor.

The jinxed story of Robert Durst doesn’t lend itself to a second season the way Netflix’s Making a Murderer or even Serial might, but Durst himself has been grounds for belching parody for decades. Now, Lifetime will take The Jinx story in a semi-serious route, developing an original movie based on the decades-long saga of Durst’s mysterious deaths.