July 16, 2024

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.

[for the full BET-CRP, click here, or upgrade your sub and get complete reviews/write-ups straight to your email]

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).

And as my work wife Tara Ariano noted when we talked about GitN for Again With Again With This, Doherty was an outstanding cryer, a critical skill in the genre.

As well, Doherty would have slayed a Quentin Tarantino alternate-universe take on a major case. A victim's outraged parent, an over-it chief of police, a community activist in a Dean Corll period piece -- I mean, right? She was a prime candidate for that late-career QT re-coronation, and that fiery righteousness she brought to her iconic roles is perfect for the genre.

So, we'll never get to see her in a Gloria Allred biopic, and I hate that for all of us, but let's see how much true crime Doherty did do out of 86 acting entries on IMDb. I don't actually think it's very much -- my pre-research guess is 10 percent -- but we'll find out. (Forgot how the points work? Click here!)

• Robert Kennedy and His Times (1985) // Immediately, a wrench in the gears with a Kennedy project! I usually count them as true crime even if the specific property isn't all and only about one of the assassinations, because it's seldom not at all about the assassinations, and Robert Sr. did get assassinated. ShanDo does play a "name figure" -- Kathleen Kennedy, Robert Sr.'s daughter, whom he named for his late sister -- but she's not a name case figure, and IRL Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is not really adjacent to any crime stories: 1

• A Burning Passion: The Margaret Mitchell Story (1994) // I'd like to count it, because Mitchell also died prematurely thanks to a drunk driver running her over in the street, but I don't think I can; sorry, lady: 0

• Gone in the Night (1996) // Doherty plays Cindi Dowaliby here; that's good for: 3

• Sleeping with the Devil (1997) // The plot summary is so Lifetime-y that I couldn't imagine it was real...so of course it's a true story, from Suzanne Finstad's book of the same name. The paperback's hall-of-shame design aside, no HOF points here, but still: 3

• No One Would Tell (2018) // "Don't you mean '1996'?" No, this is the remake of the '96 original, which starred Candace Cameron Bure. They're both based on the murder of Amy Carnevale, although each production renamed the IRL figures. Only minor awards attention, and none for ShanDo, but I'm still comfortable with: 3

And that's...it! It's possible a couple of these CIA thrillers came out of true stories, but I doubt it (I think the only crime here is people thought Bruce Willis should still be working in 2021), but I can barely justify some of the points I did count, which net out at 10, and divided by 86 roles, that's 11.6 percent. If you throw out the Kennedy point, it's 10.5 percent, but I still got fairly close.