"The Good Nanny" seemed like a deliberate attempt by writer-director Jake Helgren to reverse the formula originated by Christine Conradt in her first Lifetime script, "The Perfect Nanny" (2000). Whereas that one, the first in Conradt's long line of "Perfect _____" scripts, had given us a basically decent suburban family set upon by a seemingly perfect but actually psycho woman they hire as a nanny, Helgren's script gave us a woman who isn't even a professional nanny — she's an interior designer, Summer Pratt (Lifetime veteran Briana Evigan), who's been hired to decorate the home of Travis and Lily Walsh (Peter Porte and Ellen Hollman) and ends up agreeing to look after their rather squirrelly daughter Sophie (Sophie Gurst). Summer is at liberty to do this because her own fiancé, Hefner (David Tillman), is out of town because he's just been hired to do lobbying for the company Travis and Lily Walsh own — and though they Skype each other regularly she's getting restive as his absence gets longer and longer. Summer's other big problem is that she has a medical condition that makes it difficult to conceive, and since she wants children more than just about anything else in the world that bothers her probably more than it should. When she starts filling in as Travis's and Lily's nanny, Summer has a hard time getting through to Sophie because she literally doesn't speak — our first intimation that she even can speak is when Summer hears Sophie talking to an apparently imaginary friend named "Sasha," and though both the voices are Sophie's they carry out an audible conversation in which Summer can hear both Sophie and "Sasha" exchanging misgivings about how the new nanny doesn't like them any better than the last one did.
Helgren shows a certain flair for the Gothic, though his effects with low-keyed lighting, offbeat camera angles and doomy music seem to be playing against his relatively straightforward story and he takes his own sweet time explaining to us just what's wrong with this picture — why Sophie seems so alienated from her parents, why they seem to regard her as a burden and Travis in particular makes it pretty clear he doesn't want her around at all. Eventually, with the help of her friend, African-American pediatrician Dr. Monica Thorne (Tatyana Ali, the only cast member here I can remember seeing, or even hearing of, ouside the corridors of Lifetime) — the usual Lifetime Black person whose plot function is to serve as the voice of reason and try to steer the white characters away from all the stupid things they have to do for this, or any other Lifetime movie, to have a plot at all — Summer finally catches on that "Sasha" and Sophie are actually the same person. Her real name is Sasha Carter and she's the daughter, not of Lily, but of her scapegrace sister Tara (a nicely slatternly bad-girl performance by Kym Jackson), who's been a fugitive from justice ever since she stabbed her abusive husband (the father of Sophie a.k.a. Sasha) to death.
There are some neat touches to "The Good Nanny," including one in which Travis is getting out of his swimming pool (and yes, the sight of Peter Porte's great bod clad only in swim trunks is an aesthetic delight!), sees Summer and invites her to join him — "I'm sure Lily has an extra bikini if you feel you really need one," he says — and later Summer tells Lily about her concerns about Sophie and the way she's growing up, mentions her encounter with Travis as an aside, and all Lily cares about is, "You mean Travis came on to you?" If there's a worthwhile element in "The Good Nanny," it's the fascinating performance of Ellen Hollman as Lily; she begins the story as a virtual Stepford wife, amazingly and almost annoyingly chipper, but as the story progresses and we see how sick all the adults in it are except for Summer and Dr. Thorne, Hollman's acting rises to the challenge of the character and we realize that she and Tara are nowhere nearly as different as we thought when Tara first came onto the action (though by a glitch in the casting Kym Jackson looks more like Briana Evigan than like Ellen Hollman, and so we'd more likely believe that Tara and Summer were sisters than Tara and Lily!). Other than that, though, "The Good Nanny" is a pretty dreary and draining Lifetime non-epic whose attempts to "spin" fresh variations on the basic Lifetime formulae only come off as desperate and draggy.
Helgren shows a certain flair for the Gothic, though his effects with low-keyed lighting, offbeat camera angles and doomy music seem to be playing against his relatively straightforward story and he takes his own sweet time explaining to us just what's wrong with this picture — why Sophie seems so alienated from her parents, why they seem to regard her as a burden and Travis in particular makes it pretty clear he doesn't want her around at all. Eventually, with the help of her friend, African-American pediatrician Dr. Monica Thorne (Tatyana Ali, the only cast member here I can remember seeing, or even hearing of, ouside the corridors of Lifetime) — the usual Lifetime Black person whose plot function is to serve as the voice of reason and try to steer the white characters away from all the stupid things they have to do for this, or any other Lifetime movie, to have a plot at all — Summer finally catches on that "Sasha" and Sophie are actually the same person. Her real name is Sasha Carter and she's the daughter, not of Lily, but of her scapegrace sister Tara (a nicely slatternly bad-girl performance by Kym Jackson), who's been a fugitive from justice ever since she stabbed her abusive husband (the father of Sophie a.k.a. Sasha) to death.
There are some neat touches to "The Good Nanny," including one in which Travis is getting out of his swimming pool (and yes, the sight of Peter Porte's great bod clad only in swim trunks is an aesthetic delight!), sees Summer and invites her to join him — "I'm sure Lily has an extra bikini if you feel you really need one," he says — and later Summer tells Lily about her concerns about Sophie and the way she's growing up, mentions her encounter with Travis as an aside, and all Lily cares about is, "You mean Travis came on to you?" If there's a worthwhile element in "The Good Nanny," it's the fascinating performance of Ellen Hollman as Lily; she begins the story as a virtual Stepford wife, amazingly and almost annoyingly chipper, but as the story progresses and we see how sick all the adults in it are except for Summer and Dr. Thorne, Hollman's acting rises to the challenge of the character and we realize that she and Tara are nowhere nearly as different as we thought when Tara first came onto the action (though by a glitch in the casting Kym Jackson looks more like Briana Evigan than like Ellen Hollman, and so we'd more likely believe that Tara and Summer were sisters than Tara and Lily!). Other than that, though, "The Good Nanny" is a pretty dreary and draining Lifetime non-epic whose attempts to "spin" fresh variations on the basic Lifetime formulae only come off as desperate and draggy.