To anyone eagerly anticipating a return to television from Will Farrell and Kristen Wiig, you won’t have long to wait at all. The former Saturday Night Live stars are making a fascinatingly odd return to the small screen for the heightened Lifetime drama A Deadly Adoption, which now has its first teaser trailer. Check it out.
Rarely does a 20-second clip cause such feelings of tangled confusion and near-amusement. It’s too short for any real sense of self to come through, and though it’s supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek affair, it’s almost too serious to inspire a legitimate first impression. Maybe that’s the point though, as nothing about this movie has been very straightforward. Still, it looks good enough to get us cautiously excited.
In the film, which is said to be inspired by a true story like much of Lifetime’s more sordid fare, Ferrell and Wiig play a successful married couple who take a pregnant woman (played by 90210’s Jessica Lowndes) into their house in the latter half of her pregnancy. Their goal involves adopting the woman’s child after it has been born, but something goes wrong and everything takes a downward turn. It looks like the trailer mostly takes place post-crisis, as Lowndes’ character is looking pretty pissed off behind the wheel of a vehicle, and both Wiig and Ferrell’s characters have blood on them – with Wiig’s face appearing injured.
I’d initially thought that the married couple would be the antagonizing force here, possibly because the girl wouldn’t be willing to give up her child, but it could be that the impending mother herself has a different agenda in mind. The film was written by Spoils of Babylon’s Andrew Steele, who is no stranger to subverting storylines for the sake of strange comedy. It was directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg, who helmed Escape from Polygamy and Love at the Christmas Table, so there’s no real sense of genre there.
A Deadly Adoption was filmed in complete secrecy earlier this year and was supposed to make it almost to its airdate without anyone being aware of it, but the news broke of its existence on April Fools’ Day, where it was taken with a grain of salt. Ferrell then came out and said that the project was being scrapped since the surprise was ruined, but others said that was nonsense, and a promotional poster popped up in L.A. last week with a release date, cementing its validity.
Find A Deadly Adoption in all of its bloody glory when it premieres on Saturday, June 20, on Lifetime.
