#LifetimeFail: How Your Campy Brittany Murphy Movie Got Me Tweet-Enraged!

By Justine Barron

My husband and I had just been talking about how few celebrities deaths make us genuinely sad and not just Facebook sad. I confessed that I was genuinely sad when Brittany Murphy died because I was going to miss the future we would’ve had together — of me, watching her, be talented.

To squeeze a little more future together, I watched Lifetime’s “The Brittany Murphy Story.” The first five minutes were so campy awful that I started live-tweeting it. I assumed Lifetime + biopic = easy ridicule and yucks.

I didn’t expect to end up down a dark rabbit hole of fury, conspiracy theory, and internet research around Ms. Murphy’s death. Sneaky Lifetime was careful to avoid defamation, but they hinted at enough tawdriness (over two back-to-back movies) to make a rejected CSI script out of the reality of her death — the simple facts of which are readily available online. It was almost fun watching them desperately and badly write around the truth, except that what they implied was so cruel.

Is Lifetime “Television for Women”? Or “television that demoralizes and trashes the reputation of genuinely talented, hard-working women in their graves?” You pick the better slogan!

Anyway, here is my real-time experience watching the Lifetime Brittany Murphy train wreck. This captures it better than I could now, in reflection, and hopefully spares you from watching any of it yourself:

You can read it here: http://www.autopsyfiles.org/reports/Celebs/murphy,%20brittany_report.pdf. There is some evidence that their house had toxic mold, which might be consistent with some of her medications. Again, anemia + mold + pneumonia doesn’t make a sexy Lifetime villain.