The Shannen Doherty BET-CRP
the true crime that's worth your time
It isn't the first thing I thought of when my esteemed colleague Alan Sepinwall texted me the news of Shannen Doherty's passing over the weekend...or even the fourth thing I thought of, but eventually I did wonder how much true crime the legendary Brenda Walsh had on her acting résumé.
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I knew about at least one property, 1996's Gone in the Night -- the book version of which happened to come up next in Susan Howard's Edgars-flashback rotation -- and I knew Doherty had a lot of Lifetime-y thrillers on her IMDb page, and because a lot of those end up having a basis in IRL events, I thought running Doherty's Best Evidence True-Crime Résumé Percentage made sense.
Before I even ran the numbers, which I'll get to in a sec, I was wishing she'd done more in the genre, and not just because we all wish Doherty had done more, period, because 53 years old is much much too young. Rather, it's that Doherty had a certain commitment in her work -- maybe she didn't do the best or subtlest acting, but she never shorted the bag -- that's crucial to putting over some of the C-plus writing actors have to work with in a two-hour TV movie (or a teen drama, for that matter).