[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]
Ripped from the headlines things are generally not my jam, but I do make exceptions when my people star in the films. Cases in point, our Luke Macfarlane and Warren Christie have both played actual killers and if I didn’t cover them explicitly, I did ask about the projects the next time I interviewed them.
This weekend, Steve Byers is in the hot seat, playing William Bradford, an 80s serial killer who preyed on the young women he photographed. He’s ostensibly the co-lead of the project, which spends as much time separately on his character as the titular Alina Shepherd, played by Brielle Robillard, who is in fact alive and well and did dodge a dangerous bullet.
When we meet them separately in 1984 LA, Bradford is in a bar angling to photograph a customer, dangling the prospect of modeling contacts and possible fame, and we see pretty quickly that that’s his hook. He baits women who hope he’s a path to a sparkly future. Alina Thompson is 15 and very tight with her parents, her dad, Carl (Sam Trammell), more so than her mom, Nancy (Ashley Jones, who also produces), but that doesn’t prevent her from conspiring with her bestie to tell her parents a cover story so they can take a bus to a photocall being attended by several photographers, including Bradford.
Almost immediately, Bradford is smitten with her, fixating on her and saying all the right promising things in an attempt to find out more about her and get her on her own, but fortunately there are enough guardrails around her that it takes a while for him to succeed on either front. In the intersection of plotting, he continues to hunt women, including a new acquaintance of Alina, whose disappearance sets off alarm bells for her and her family and community because she’s a minor.
Before long, the police start to piece together that her disappearance is connected to other disappearances of young, but not teenage, women, that didn’t seem related. Meanwhile, Bradford keeps resurfacing around Alina and gaining more and more access to her. As the title reveals, she survives their encounters, but there’s still enough suspense around the how of it, although the pacing rushes a bit in the final act.
Byers is his usual charismatic self in the role, which is the whole point. He lets just enough, “You in danger, girl,” desperation seep into his All-American (All-Canadian) good looks and good guy persona as his urgency to isolate and photograph Alina and the other women escalates. He also works the bravado as Bradford gets cocky about how long he’s been able to do this, which we learn is a while.
The rest of the cast is solid, with Robillard navigating Alina’s emotional turmoil of being a teenager who wants something more for herself alongside the angst of bestie and boyfriend drama and appeasing her folks, so her self-protection radar is bit off-kilter to see the threat in front of her.
Trammell and Jones strike a good balance off each other as Carl and Nancy alternate between good cop/bad cop and an aligned front. Michelle Ouellet directs a script by Christine Conradt.
The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story premieres Saturday, September 20th, at 8 pm/7c on Lifetime and repeats at midnight/11c. It’ll be streaming on Lifetime the next day. Here’s a sneak peek. https://www.instagram.com/p/DOblcqekS9r/
Photos and videos courtesy of Lifetime Television.
