TV Movie Review: 'Loved to Death' Is the Least Crazy TV One TV Movie Yet

My growing obsession with TV One and their brand of uniquely insane TV movies sadly may be cooling off. After the wild camp of Bobby DeBarge, the utter ludicrousness of Sins of the Father and the utterly bonkers final minutes of In Broad Daylight, TV One finally aims for a respectable TV movie with Loved to Death and I find myself a little bummed out.

Don't misunderstand, it's not that Loved to Death, a wonderfully silly title, is a bad movie. The issue is that Loved to Death is not bad at all. TV One has set such a high bar for crazy that it was bound to happen, I guess, that they would have to eventually make a non-crazy flick. That non-crazy flick is Loved to Death and it is simply too adequate for me to truly enjoy.

Loved to Death stars Melinda Williams, as Monica, who we meet as she is going to work at a parking garage. Monica has just left her car with her loving fiancee Dre (Tobias Truvillion) who is taking her car to have a broken window repaired. After Dre has left and Monica has started her day in her booth at the garage, we hear a gunshot in the distance.

Cut to five years earlier and Monica and her sister, Courtney (Chrsytee Pharris) are leaving a movie when Monica drops her car keys. The keys are retrieved and returned by Jackson (McKinley Freeman), a tall, dark, and handsome type who has immediate chemistry with Monica. The two fall into a relationship but cracks quickly begin to show.

Jackson may be tall, dark and handsome, but he's also broke and jobless. In the first two years of their relationship Jackson doesn't have a steady job, borrows money to start a business that he abandons almost as soon as he starts it, and is generally a no good layabout. Worse yet, he slowly becomes verbally, emotionally and physically abusive. As he attempts to drive a wedge between Monica and her family the relationship strains to its breaking point.

Monica's only respite from Jackson, after he convinced her to let him move in, is at church. Pastor (Ernest L Thomas of What's Happening fame) has her in the church choir and her entire family attends the church, while Jackson refuses to go. It's the Pastor who encourages Monica to spend time with a new member of the church, Deacon Dre.

You can sense where this is headed. Monica is going to try to leave Jackson, as she begins to fall for Dre and danger ensues. I will say this for Loved to Death, I wasn't expecting where this movie was headed. In the final minutes, we get a police procedural and a two minute episode of Law & Order crammed into about four minutes of screen time.

I won't spoil how we end up in that courtroom, but it is much more surprising than you might think. The police procedural and the courtroom drama however, can't rise to the level of crazy as last week's TV One presentation, In Broad Daylight. That movie came hard and fast with the crazy in the final minutes. Loved to Death just feels rushed in comparison.

Strangely, the biggest issue facing Loved to Death is the network, TV One, itself. TV One has established a tone of utter insanity in their TV movie presentations, that for them to deliver a TV movie this adequately and entertainingly melodramatic feels like a letdown. It shouldn't be this way, as Loved to Death is a perfectly good TV movie with compelling characters and genuine drama.

Melinda Williams delivers a fine performance as Monica. Monica, as a character, shows that even if you make all the correct decisions to extricate yourself from an abuse situation it may not be enough. It's a sad fact of life that even making the right choices can still lead to a bad outcome. That doesn't mean that you or Monica should make the wrong choices, just that life is unpredictable and sometimes tragic in ways that are simply unavoidable.

Loved to Death really is quite a good TV Movie. The performances are all solid, including a cameo by rapper M.C Lyte as one of Monica's sisters, and the drama is compelling, even quite moving at the end. The movie is not without its issues, such as introducing a full on courtroom drama in the final two minutes of the movie, that is some high end nonsense, but on the other hand, the movie doesn't overstay its welcome.

And yet, for all of the genuinely good things about Loved to Death, I can't help but be just a little disappointed. Loved to Death has none of the giddy thrills of my three previous TV One TV movie experiences. There is no camp sadness or bad wigs, there are no quirky detectives or over the top priests and no psychics introduced out of left field to provide deus ex machina.

In each of my previous reviews I have recommended the movie, well not Bobby Debarge, that's a whole other set of crazy, as a side dish to a bottle of wine and good friends. Loved to Death is not a movie I can recommend that way. There is nothing to really mock or giggle at in this movie. Everything is just so darn respectable and adequate. Loved to Death is too good for its own good.

Loved to Death debuts on TV One on Saturday, July 20th at 8 Pm ET and 7 PM CT.