TV Movie Review: 'In Broad Daylight' Is TV One At Its Melodramatic Best

Okay, I am becoming obsessed with TV One melodramas. First there was the earnest and sad comedy of The Bobby DeBarge Story, and then, on July seventh, there was the incredibly odd, but incredibly watchable Sins of the Father. Now, on July 14, comes In Broad Daylight, the latest TV One movie of the week, and once again TV One has crafted a drama so remarkably strange and watchable that it almost defies description.

In Broad Daylight stars Chyna Layne, recently of The First Purge, and Spike Lee's Netflix series, She's Gotta Have It, as Jordan. We meet Jordan as she is embroiled in a car chase. Jordan has a baby in the backseat, and is quickly formulating a plan to get the baby to safety from whomever is chasing after her.

The man chasing Jordan is her former boyfriend, and the father of her child, Steve (Curtis Hamilton). When Jordan pulls over in a grocery store parking lot, she manages to get the baby to a helpful stranger, but she herself is taken... In Broad Daylight. Cut to two years earlier. Jordan is at a family barbecue surrounded by a huge family with many cousins, including her closest cousin, Malik (Shad 'Lil Bow Wow' Moss).

Malik has brought his pal Steve to the barbecue, and now Steve is flirting with Malik's cousin. The chemistry between Jordan and Steve is palpable, even Jordan's mom comments on it, and requests that Malik bring Steve to a family dinner. Jordan and Steve fall into a relationship, but slowly, cracks begin to show in Steve's good guy exterior.

Deeply insecure, Steve begins to cut Jordan off from her family. He repeatedly uses manipulative tactics to keep her with him rather than visiting her mother. Troublingly, her mother says that his jealousy is a good thing, a sign of just how much he loves her. The mother is far too underdeveloped as a character for us to find out how she feels about how wrong she proves to be.

When Jordan becomes pregnant, the first signs of the depths of Steve's insecurity begin to show. But is Steve a violent abuser? You will need to see In Broad Daylight to find out. Director Kenn Michael adds a slight bit of mystery early on in, In Broad Daylight, enough that you may begin to wonder if Steve is the person who kidnapped Jordan.

The mystery is modest, as the movie is far more direct in being about domestic violence than it is about being a mystery. In just 80 minutes we get a fully well-rounded story about an insecure abuser, and the depths of his depravity, and we get a family story that is filled with care and empathy, and headed up by a very compelling performance by Shad Moss.

Then, the final five minutes of In Broad Daylight arrived, and l lost my mind. With five minutes left in the run time, the makers of In Broad Daylight break every rule in the history of modern storytelling. The makers of In Broad Daylight introduce three characters we've never seen before in the movie, and an element of, no joke, the supernatural.

Yes three, brand new, never before seen, and never seen again characters are introduced with five minutes left in the movie. But then, the makers of In Broad Daylight kick in an element of the supernatural, and we are intended to treat this with seriousness and gravity, rather than being offended by such nakedly terrible storytelling. It's all so ludicrous, so completely insane that I can't help but admire the audacity of such a boldly silly, and poorly thought out addition to an otherwise straight forward melodrama.

I laughed out loud and screamed at my television, because I was so shocked, appalled, and entertained at the sheer ballsy craziness of the ending of In Broad Daylight. Unlike Sins of the Father, which introduces crazy nonsense plotting and characters in the first ten minutes, In Broad Daylight pulls off the neat trick of saving all the crazy for the very end, and allowing it to explode in a mad display of pure Deus Ex Machina, glorious idiocy.

Just when I thought that the good people at TV One had finally made a straight forward TV drama they manage to pack the crazy of all of Sins of the Father and The Bobby DeBarge Story into the final five minutes of In Broad Daylight, and I ate up every moment of that crazy. I couldn't resist it, it's like a rich cake of lunacy, and I had to have every bite.

As a rational, professional television critic with decades of experience, I am supposed to be mad. As a critic, I am supposed to be angry and dismissive and I am supposed to pan In Broad Daylight, and yet I can't. The utter madcap irreverence of the final five minutes of In Broad Daylight may have compromised what was a compelling bit of television melodrama, but it also made it memorable and wildly entertaining in a way that I could never have predicted.

I am in love with these final five minutes of In Broad Daylight. Legitimately, I thought I was going to write a simple, satisfied review of a melodrama about abuse that demonstrated a realness and professional polish that I really appreciated. Then the final five minutes arrived with all of the insanity of a daytime soap opera, and I was hopping up and down in complete shock, laughing uproariously and uncontrollably at a movie that is not intended for any kind of humor.

The final five minutes of In Broad Daylight are so dumb and inappropriate and hilarious that I recommend the movie just for the sheer, tasteless audacity of the final minutes of what was a movie I admired that became a movie I both lament, and yet will never forget. Truly TV One is creating some of the most interesting trash television of recent memory. TV One has combined the silliness of a Lifetime TV drama with the aesthetic of BET drama, and somehow it's everything I never knew I wanted.

In Broad Daylight, formerly titled Blood on the Bayou, debuts on TV One on Sunday, July 14 at 8 PM. Watch it with wine and friends.