The Lifetime Movie Network is like a black hole: Once you're sucked into its powerful vortex of based-on-a-true-story telepics, you may never escape. Yet this courageous EW reporter watched 12 hours of LMN and lived to tell the tale.
7:45 a.m. ''Dark Mirror.'' Early-'80s Aaron Spelling product. Jane Seymore plays twins! The good one wears a headband.
8:03 a.m. Stephen Collins turns up as a kindly psychiatrist. I have a box of powdered doughnuts. Now I feel alive.
9:48 a.m. ''Dying to Be Perfect.'' Crystal Bernard stars as a Harvard grad/bulimic/hot mayor's wife/marathon runner. Her coach is a mean/really mean/super-mean man who makes her slim down.
10:15 a.m. Crystal and I are eating the same doughnuts!!
11:30 a.m. Must...not...doze...off.
Noon Early on in ''Final Justice,'' a lawyer mentions ''oral sex in a bathtub full of vegetable oil.'' I am awake again.
12:56 p.m. Why is there an ad for ''Fat Albert'' cartoons?
1:30 p.m. ''Seduction in a Small Town.'' Vixen (Joely Fisher) moves in on good woman's (Melissa Gilbert) husband. She offers him doughnuts and smokes a lot. Dizzily, I stub my Marlboro Light out in a doughnut.
2:44 p.m. I need something to love and protect NOW!! I check the closet -- maybe I have a child I forgot about.
2:45 p.m. I don't.
3-6 p.m.-ish Afternoon sugar slump. All the movies are blending together: Pregnant Gabrielle Anwar wonders which of her four boyfriends is the dad. Meanwhile, someone sues big tobacco, a horny ex-husband rides a motorcycle, and Christine Lahti makes chili for a motherless teen.
6:15 p.m. Three words: ''Girls in Prison.''
6:30 p.m. So, Anne Heche and Ione Skye and, like, two other girls commit murder. Skye finds a prison girlfriend to make out with in the shower. Hey, I thought this was television for WOMEN!
7:24 p.m. Constant exposure to ads for Pasta Pro has me convinced that I need one right this minute.
7:?? p.m. The movie loses me after Heche frames herself for shoplifting to get into prison. I feel a vague desire to either sue my dead ex-boyfriend's parents for sole custody of our kidnapped child or take a long, hot bath.
