“Jason Priestley is gettin’ old.” This has been the primary thought on my mind whenever I ride the N or R trains in Manhattan lately, as the insides of seemingly all of these cars are plastered with ads for ‘Side Order of Life,’ an original series on Lifetime. The ads promise that the main character “needs to be rescued... from her picture-perfect life,” and feature Priestley in the background looking bewildered and-- well, I’ll just say it-- Botoxed. The ads generally look confusing and so Lifetimey they may as well have ovaries.
‘Side Order,’ which debuts this Sunday at 9 p.m. on the network, follows Jenny (Marisa Coughlan), a woman forced to re-evaluate her priorities in life when her best friend, Vivi (Diana Maria Riva), is diagnosed with cancer. This re-evaluation involves dumping her too-perfect fiance (Priestley) and cancelling the wedding she has been obsessing over for months.
Sounds...annoying, frankly, but many of the people who have actually seen the show don’t agree. The New York Times gives credit to Riva, noting she “brings wit and real charisma to the shopworn role of funny, plainer best friend.” Reuters is even kinder: "Side Order of Life" feels like it has the potential to be the finest original production this long-sappy, formula-driven network has ever done.” The San Jose Mercury News, on the other hand, gets caught up in the muddled narrative, and not in the good way: “What you get here is a string of vignettes - some are effective, some aren't - with little continuity and no real sense of precisely what's going on.”
As someone who never tired of ‘Golden Girls’ re-runs, I see no reason why Lifetime should try to capture the ‘Grey’s Anatomy’/’Desperate Housewives’ chicks-on-TV zeitgeist. But Lifetime is the kind of place where women-- or discriminating men, I don’t judge-- can always turn for pretty much the same kind of entertainment: empowerment, friendship, occasional humor, and occasional true-life horror stories about anorexia. If ‘Side Order’-- and another new show, ‘State of Mind,’ also debuting Sunday-- can deliver those elements with some level of quality, then who’s to lose? Lifetime might be able to build off the momentum of ‘Army Wives’ and start a whole new level of programming for themselves. And then maybe-- please?-- they won’t have to cram my subway car full of ads anymore.
See previews for the show and all sorts of other information at the official website here.
If you cant wait for the premiere of 'Side Order of Life' (which will air this Sunday on Lifetime at 8:00 p.m.) you can check out the first episode on Yahoo TV here. (We suggest you use Internet Explorer to view the video because Firefox requires some kind of add-on in order to play it)
