Perhaps the biggest update is assigning Emma’s parenting to a widower, though that change in the story isn’t used to explore how a father might struggle to raise a little girl, but rather to touch on how it might impact a father’s social life when his daughter is constantly throwing out homicidal roadblocks. When he proposes a trip to a psychiatrist, Emma quickly understands what he’s getting at and replies, “I watch Intervention.” See? Totally modern! When David begins to wonder about his daughter’s welfare, he now has the ability to go to something called - as of this writing, Lifetime hadn’t bothered to park a site at the domain, which is just plain lazy - and read helpful articles like “Unusual Behavior in Children,” a slightly more subtle approach than a close-up of David typing “Is my daughter a serial killer?” into Google. It just might have added some welcome satire and contemporary specificity. The medal that so obsesses the central character was originally for perfect penmanship, and heaven knows nobody cares about that anymore, but was “citizenship” really the only way to go? Portraying Emma as an exceptionalist in an everybody-gets-a-trophy world wouldn’t have demystified the character. Still, there are missed opportunities for character-driven fun. Some kids are just born bad, and the lack of over-explanation is part of what’s potent here. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course. This definitely is not an opportunity to polish up the psychological realism of the narrative. So what have we gained by updating The Bad Seed for 2018? Very little.
Call it The Bad Seed and you tap into a surface-glaze legitimacy that’s probably unwarranted, because the movie, notable as co-star Rob Lowe’s directing debut, achieves only a baseline amount of trashy fun, nothing more or less. Call this latest Lifetime flick How Can I Get Back Into the Dating Pool When My Daughter Keeps Killing People? and you generate enthusiastic eye-rolling and drinking games. The documentary series Killer Kids has played on Lifetime, and the network’s rich vein of homicidal twins and evil adoptees stretches back decades. It’s a long way to go in order to attach a recognizable brand name to what would otherwise be a pretty standard Lifetime movie in one of the network’s tried-and-true genres. Barbara Marshall wrote the new teleplay, with nods to the original 1954 novel by William March, the subsequent play by Maxwell Anderson and the feature screenplay by John Lee Mahin. Lifetime’s new version of The Bad Seed lists a Russian nesting doll of writing credits.
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