Stream It or Skip It: ‘Black Girl Missing’ on Lifetime Casts Garcelle Beauvais as a Mother Searching for Her Daughter

Lifetime’s Black Girl Missing wasn’t just ripped from one headline. The feature — part of the network’s Stop Violence Against Women campaign — was more so ripped from headlines that remain unpublished because they’re about missing women of color. Garcelle Beauvais — who you may recognize from regular roles on shows ranging from The Real to NYPD Blue to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills — executive produced the film while also playing a mother desperately searching for her missing daughter.

BLACK GIRL MISSING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Garcelle Beauvais plays Cheryl, a working mother and widow with a strict approach to raising her two daughters. That’s hard for high schooler Marley (Taylor Mosby) since her mom is also her vice principal. It’s even hard for older daughter Lauren (Iyana Halley) who’s having a difficult time adjusting to college and is struggling with depression. Cheryl doesn’t hear Lauren’s complaints, nor does she notice that she’s getting lots of texts and phone calls from a mystery number. After a blowup about Lauren’s wanting to drop out, Cheryl finds herself on the outs with her oldest daughter. But what first seems like Lauren ignoring her mom’s calls takes a darker turn when Cheryl discovers that Lauren hasn’t been seen at the dorms for a while.

Cheryl immediately reports her daughter as missing to the police, but they’re reluctant to do anything since Lauren is over 18. Cheryl can’t even get the local media to pay attention because there’s a missing white girl who’s delivering big ratings. With no help from the outside, Cheryl and her daughter Marley take matters into their own hands and do whatever it takes to find Lauren.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The movie is more of a supersized episode of Law & Order: SVU, including the way it crafts a narrative around a real world issue. Lifetime ain’t the only network that metaphorically rips headlines out of newspapers. The major difference here is that the police are literally useless in this case and all of the law falls to a widowed mother, her teenage daughter, and a collective of internet detectives called the Net Sleuths.

Performance Worth Watching: Taylor Mosby brings a lot of urgency and heart to the role of Marley, a teenager who has to carry the responsibility of finding her missing sister while also dealing with high school, racist double standards, and bullies. It should be school policy that you should be exempt from homework if you’re also conducting an exhaustive search for a missing loved one.

Memorable Dialogue: The true sign that things are very, very wrong come from Lauren’s Instagram — I mean Picktagrin feed: “She even missed #mondaymotivation.”

Our Take: Providing a “take” for a TV event like Black Girl Missing is borderline impossible. There are two ways to look at it. One of those ways is as a movie, an original narrative with characters and themes and a plot. The other is as a public service announcement, as a piece of media designed first and foremost to draw attention to an issue. Black Girl Missing is both, and reviewing it like a movie means detracting from the very necessary public service that it is providing.

As a movie, Black Girl Missing is not so much a movie as a 90 minute commercial (plus, y’know, actual commercials). The entirety of the plot could be condensed into a 60-second PSA spot that could — and should — run during every Lifetime movie. Everything about the film feels perfunctory because none of the choices are being made to serve the movie so much as the message. It’s really hard to critique the thin plot or broad characters when you know that crafting an original, Emmy-worthy movie that stands on its own is not the point here.

The point of Black Girl Missing is that Black Girl Missing exists. The point here is to draw attention to the Black and Missing Foundation and the very real epidemic of missing women of color. The point of Black Girl Missing is to give star Garcelle Beauvais a reason to go on a press tour to further draw attention to this deadly, systemic prejudice that affects thousands of people every year. This is why Black Girl Missing has a companion special airing after the movie’s premiere, and it’s why Lifetime is replaying 4 times over the weekend. It just feels incredibly small and pointless to critique a TV movie for having the subtlety of an airhorn when the message is one of literal life and death.

All that being said, yes, if the movie was more original then maybe it would be more rewatchable and therefore able to spread the message even more. Maybe ripping the movie from one specific headline rather than a larger, unreported cultural phenomenon would have helped. There’s still universality in specificity, and specificity makes for a more engaging story. As it is, Black Girl Missing tries to be a composite of all the stories and ends up feeling a bit generic.

It needs to be pointed out that if you want to see specific stories, you can turn to HBO Max and stream the docuseries Black and Missing. That series delivers the same message as Black Girl Missing but via a completely different medium — and, honestly, it’s in comparing the Lifetime movie to the HBO series that Black Girl Missing’s whole point becomes clear. There’s the level of prestige that an HBO doc affords a cause, and then there’s the level of wide, mainstream exposure that a Lifetime movie can provide. More people are going to see Black Girl Missing, and that’s the point.

Our Call: STREAM IT, because the news media has already given a “skip it” to the stories of so many missing women of color.