Lifetime's The College Admissions Scandal movie will leave you feeling cheated

The Daily Beast

"It’s not trashy or seedy, or even that campy in any way," says Kevin Fallon of the film based on the college cheating scandal that embroiled Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. "There’s no dialed-up intensity of the kind we might see in a topical episode of Law & Order: SVU, for example. Are any of those things what people wanted when they turned giddy over the news that Lifetime would be turning the saga into a movie? Or, given the real-world gravity of what happened, is this what we really craved: a straightforward distillation of one of the more outrageous stories of wealth, privilege, and celebrity that has played out in recent years? If that’s true, The College Admissions Scandal seems as pointless as it is, I suppose, satisfying. It’s about as good as you might expect a film to be when it premieres seven months to the day after the events it is based on took place. So, congrats to Lifetime on its speed?"

ALSO:

• The College Admission Scandal is less an oily TV movie than an afterschol special: "You won't learn anything knew, but you may delight in witnessing a few insecure idiots get flushed down the toilet," says Daniel Fienberg, adding: "One day we'll get an extravagant TV movie about the B-list celebrity foils who tried to game the system, but for now we must settle for this slapdash and camp-less one that does a lot more telling than showing."
• Penelope Ann Miller saves the movie from being camp, while Mia Kirshner goes big as the mom who doesn't understand the consequences
• At its best, the movie effectively illustrates the cynical calculus that these parents made, as well as the rationalizations employed to justify their actions
• The College Admission Scandal is as bland as its title
• What to expect from Beyond the Headlines: The College Admissions Scandal with Gretchen Carlson that follows The College Admissions Scandal movie