Stream It Or Skip It: ‘V.C. Andrews’ Dawn’ On Lifetime, About A Teen Who Finds Out Her Life Is A Lie And What Happens In The Aftermath

Apparently, Lifetime has found a franchise with properties based on V.C. Andrews’ novels. Last year, it was a prequel to Flowers In The Attic. This year, it’s the decades-spanning Cutler series, starting with the 1990 novel Dawn.

V.C. ANDREWS’ DAWN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of a graveyard. A voice says, “My mother once told me that she and my father named me Dawn because I was born at the break of day. That was the first of a thousand lies they would tell me and my brother Jimmy.”

The Gist: It’s 1973, and the Longchamp family is about to move for what seems like the umpteenth time. Dawn Longchamp (Brec Bassinger) and her older brother Jimmy (Khobe Clarke) have a close relationship — perhaps a bit too close. And they also have a trusting relationship with their parents Ormand (Jesse Metcalf) and Sally (Helena Marie). Ormand just got a job as the head custodian at a ritzy private high school in Richmond, Virginia, and he hopes this is their last move.

On her first day at her new school, Dawn inadvertently rats out a popular girl, Clara Jean Cutler (Elyse Maloway), who immediately starts to bully her. When Dawn tells her parents the name of the girl, Ormand and Sally are concerned that the Cutlers are at the school. As much as Dawn tries to stay away from Clara Jean, though, the more they interact, especially when Dawn gets the singing solo at the recital Clara Jean was supposed to get. On top of that, Clara Jean’s older brother Philip (Dane Schioler) takes a liking to Dawn, and the two of them make out in his Mustang.

Shortly after Sally gives birth to Dawn’s younger sister, though, she gets sick. She eventually dies of consumption, and at the hospital, a security guard recognizes Ormand and calls the police. Dawn finds out that Ormand isn’t her real father; he and Sally kidnapped her shortly after she was born. Her real name is Eugenia Cutler — yep, that means Clara Jean and Philip are her sister and brother.

She’s taken to the hotel that the Cutler family owns, which is ruled with an iron fist by her grandmother, Lilian Cutler (Donna Mills). Lilian puts Dawn to work as a chamber maid and treats her cruelly at every turn. The two people who are her supposed parents, Randolph (Jason Cermak) and Laura Jean (Miranda Frigon), are powerless in Lilian’s presence. Clara Jean still tortures her, and Philip is still wildly attracted to her. It seems that the only thing Dawn has left is her name, and that’s jeopardized when Lilian insists on calling her Eugenia.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Given that Dawn is based on V.C. Andrews’ Cultler series, there are definitely themes that this series shares with Flowers In The Attic: The Origin. By the way, the Cutler series was actually completed by Andrews’ ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman in the years after her death in 1988.

Our Take: Like Flowers In The Attic: The Origin, V.C. Andrews’ Dawn consists of four feature-length episodes. This time around, though, there is literary source material in the form of the Cutler series novels. The first episode covers the events from the first book in the series, Dawn. And just like last year’s series, there are moments in V.C. Andrews’ Dawn that are intensely silly and head-smacking ridiculous. But the performances by Bassinger and Mills help the first episode overcome a lot of that.

Even if you’ve never read the books the series is based on, it’s not hard to figure out just where Dawn’s life is going in the first half of this first episode. For some reason, though, we were distracted by a weird, Boston wiseguy affectation taken on by Metcalf as Dawn’s dad. While it feels like the segments where Dawn is a Longchamp are a bit too long in context of the story, it does help establish how much affection she had for the family that raised her, no matter what the circumstances.

The episode doesn’t really get going, though, until Mills shows up as Lillian, chunks of scenery falling from her teeth from the first seconds she’s on the screen. She certainly hasn’t lost any of her ability to play a cold and calculating sociopath in the decades since Knotts Landing ended, and she brings all of that ability to embody pure evil as Lillian. But Bassinger also shines in the scenes where she stands up to her grandmother, and then confronts her about the truth behind her abduction. Even as the story changes in Episode 2, with Fran Drescher and Joey McIntyre entering the picture as Dawn goes to study music in New York, we’re hoping Mills hangs around to torture the entire Cutler family, whether it’s in the flesh or only in their heads.

Speaking of that transition, the first episode does end on a bit of an anticlimax, right in the same spot the first book ends. It’s not as much the ending itself, which is expected given the fact that there are three more episodes to go, but how we got there that was a disappointment. There’s an ultimate confrontation that seems to fizzle, given what was leading up to it. But that disappointment would be more concerning if this were the last episode instead of the first.

The rest of the first episode consists of the usual dark, incestual stuff you’ve seen or read before in Andrews’ books and adaptations, all of which creeped us the eff out but didn’t really move the needle as far as the story was concerned. Oh, there’s also a stuffed cat that was probably the creepiest thing in the whole 84 minutes of runtime. We were happy our cats weren’t in the room for that scene; they may have run and hid.

Sex and Skin: None, despite all of the incestual stuff we mention above.

Parting Shot: After that confrontation we mentioned above, Dawn gets in a car and leaves Cutler Cove.

Sleeper Star: Khobe Clarke almost pulls off the balance of Jimmy having a crush on his sister that’s not really his sister. He tries to be sincere without being skeevy-seeming, but to be honest it’s a thankless task to try to interpret all the conflicting feelings Jimmy is having throughout the episode.

Most Pilot-y Line: “And here you are, not even dead!” That’s what Sissy (Liz Wallace), a fellow chamber maid, enthusiastically says to Dawn about how she’s not dead after all.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While it’s tempting to give V.C. Andrews’ Dawn a recommendation just on the strength of the performances of Mills and Bassinger, the rest of the first episode is cheaply made with an underbaked story and clunky dialogue. For some people, it may put the show in the “it’s so bad it’s campy” category, but we think it’s just plain bad.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.