Seduction in a Small Town

And now it's time for the Most Awesome Thing I Saw on TV Last Week. The most awesome thing I saw on TV last week was a television movie called Seduction in a Small Town, although the title isn't really appropriate because it wasn't really about a seduction, although it was set in a small town, so they get it half right. Anyway, Half-Pint Ingalls, her husband, and their two kids move from the big city back to the husband's hometown, and start farming. There's a lucrative venture. And Half-Pint has a heart condition and one kid has asthma, so for a while I thought it was going to be a movie about how farmers don't have health insurance, but apparently they were able to pay for doctor visits out of pocket or something. So Half-Pint feels like an outsider, because it's a small town, so the residents are judgmental and gossipy, like people in big cities aren't also judgmental and gossipy. But Half-Pint was kind of a bitch, not to be judgmental and gossipy or anything. Although I am from a small town, so it's probably in my nature. But then a new woman moves to town, played by Joely Fisher, using a horrible Southern accent for no apparent reason, and Half-Pint befriends her because they are both outsiders. So Joely Fisher has some sort of secret shady past, as you do, and she tries to seduce Half-Pint's husband, which I guess is the seduction of the title, but it's like five minutes out of the whole movie, and it doesn't work, so it's really more like character-building than a plot point. She is also creepily overly involved with Half-Pint's kids. The final straw comes when Joely asks Half-Pint and her hubby (let's just call him Manly) for some money, which they don't have to give, because Half-Pint claims that they have six mortgages on their home, like, what bank would approve mortgages #5 and #6? On a farm, where only Manly worked, as far as I could tell, so it clearly wasn't a big-time operation. Anyway, Joely gets pissed off and reports Half-Pint to Social Services for child abuse, and she manages to talk the local harpies into swearing statements as well, because one time Half-Pint grabbed her son's arm outside the Piggly Wiggly to keep him from running into traffic. The Social Services woman is new to the job, and goes way overboard in trying to make the case, especially the scene where they totally botch confiscating the children and placing them in foster homes. It was like the FBI at Waco, and the Social Services lady was Janet Reno. Anyway, if the director knew anything about pacing, that would have been the big conflict, and the movie would have been resolved about half an hour later, but instead there was all this crap where the kids came back, and then were confiscated again, and Half-Pint had to take two psych exams, and there was a lightning storm and Half-Pint's barn burned down, and whatever! Just get to the part where Joely Fisher is revealed to be a lunatic, people! So then Half-Pint goes to Joely's hometown and finds out that she's a lunatic, and exposes her as such to the local harpies. And then the movie is STILL not over, because there's some rigmarole where Half-Pint can't get her kids back right away due to bureaucracy (always an exciting plot twist! Ooh, the tape, it is so red!) but she does get her kids back, and then the locals help her to rebuild her barn to make up for falsely accusing her of child abuse, and Half-Pint was still kind of a bitch about it, like, didn't Reverend Alden teach her about forgiveness between endless repetitions of "Bringing in the Sheaves"? So it was awesome.