Lifetime taking a look at Marc Cherry's 'Devious Maids,' other failed pilots and canceled network shows →

Here’s the thing. I know what Lifetime thinks it’s doing: getting “younger” and “sexier” with the addition of fare like The Client List, but really, it’s only making itself even more eminently mockable. I’m all for a channel devoted to programming content for women, but when that content is reinforcing negative stereotypes and rigidly normative (and heteronormative) attitudes about femininity, well, you’re actually not doing anything good for women. Their new project Clarice, based on the character from Silence of the Lambs, sounds like it could be really great, but picking up Unforgettable would be a truly awful move, and a Marc Cherry show does not inspire confidence. (Desperate Housewives, for how transgressive it claimed to be, was actually disappointingly conventional for most of its run.)