Won't Someone PLEASE Think Of The Children?

If you didn't watch the freshman (and perhaps only) season of Lifetime's Preachers' Daughters, you missed what I'm going to assume is quite a lot of fakery. Taylor Coleman did some moderately sexy posing for some iPhone photos that were meant to serve as the cover of a friend's rap album, and her parents happened to find out. Kolby Koloff spent a girls' weekend with her older sisters, one of whom happened to decide to pick the day their mom was out of town to go get a forbidden tattoo. Olivia Perry rekindled a friendship with a friend from her "partying" days, who happened to express an interest in her pastor father's Bible study/fellowship night, known as "mini-church." (Later in that episode, Olivia noticed that this kid had subsequently blocked her on Instagram, and that seemed legit.) But the fakery on display in the latest episode was not just obvious; it was in tremendously poor taste.

What you need to know is that Olivia went through a period, earlier in her life (maybe like a year and a half ago), when she had lost touch with the Lord, and was doing a lot of "partying" -- which only amounts to drinking and smoking both cigarettes and weed (unless Olivia is canny enough to limit her on-camera disclosures to those three illicit activities) and sleeping with two or more guys and getting pregnant out of wedlock (and it's definitely at least two, because an earlier episode this season revolved around her taking a DNA test to determine which of two possible sperm donors had actually fathered her daughter, Eden). Olivia has made a lot of vague references to her partying days, but we can tell they are definitely behind her because now she is very boring and, judging by the way she talks, possibly on a heavy dose of Xanax. Most episodes start with her revisiting one or another of her past transgressions, then atoning for it in some way, and finally reaffirming how much happier she is now -- and she seems to have a good relationship with her nice parents and her daughter is adorable, so she probably is.

For the finale, though, producers had to amp up the drama, so Olivia's storyline found her father, Pastor Mark, explaining to his congregation (for the cameras) that in their sect, baptism isn't a ceremony performed upon babies, but one that adults must affirmatively choose, as a symbol of their being born again in Christ. He asks who in the congregation wants to do it, and we hear him telling producers in an interview that he's hoping Olivia will be among them. She tells us she's not ready yet, and then explains to her parents over lunch that she doesn't want to get baptized now because she fears letting Jesus down if she ever slips back to her old ways. Mark assures her that she shouldn't think of baptism that way...

...but it turns out that there's something else on Olivia's mind, which she shares with her sister Audrey in a totally spontaneous (phony) on-camera conversation. Olivia's noticed that Eden seems to be getting sick a lot lately, and wonders if it's because Olivia's partying hurt Eden in utero. She tells us that she cut off her naughty behaviours once she found out she was pregnant, about a month in, but was that soon enough?!

So this is fake, right? Because unless they're straight-edge or something, I have to think most or a significant number of contemporary mothers have done the same thing, in the first days when they don't know they're pregnant, right? And most of their babies are fine? Isn't a month basically the minimum length of time it takes anyone to have even the tiniest inkling that she's pregnant? Or, Olivia is lying about how long it took her to cease her use of intoxicants, in which case, this is still fake.

But, okay, fine, Olivia decides to take Eden to the pediatrician to get checked out and make sure Olivia didn't give this happy, friendly, very cute, roly-poly nine-month-old invisible birth defects, and tells the doctor about her month of accidental pregnant substance abuse. The doctor immediately scolds her for not having disclosed this short period of overlap between partying and pregnancy, and then tells her that embryos' internal organs are formed during the first month after conception, so that process can be affected by a mother's use of "alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, meth--"

HOLD UP, DOC. Who said anything about meth? Did Olivia confess to it off-camera? Did this guy just assume that a teenager who drinks and smokes weed would also obviously smoke meth? (Is that true and I am just super-square?) Again, this is fake either way: either the show is cutting out the extent of Olivia's substance use, or else the doctor is going way too far to scare her and make this segment more dramatic.

Okay, so please go here and jump ahead to 16:19. Can we talk about how irresponsibly and misleadingly this segment is edited? The doctor starts the exam and we immediately slam into a montage. Over dramatic minor-key music, we get audio and some treated video of Mark preaching:

Romans 3:23 says, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." Temptation is designed to get people to sin, but sin's not the goal; sin's just the introduction. Once we sin, we're stuck. Do we resolve it ourselves, or do we step back into the God story and resolve it with God? "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever would believe in Him would not perish, but have eternal life." In other words, I don't have to pay the price for my sins: somebody paid it for me.

Throughout, we keep cutting back to Eden's examination at the doctor. Based on how close the camera gets to her face, it sure feels like producers are hoping that she starts bawling -- which would be normal, by the way, for any baby getting poked at by an unfamiliar person -- but she handles it like a champ. But the most disgusting moment is when the montage cuts from the last line of Mark's sermon to Eden, the very obvious implication being that Eden, because she keeps getting colds or whatever, is the one who's paying the price for Olivia's sins.

This is the segment that sends us into commercial, anxious about the possibility that Eden really has suffered a compromised immune system (or worse) because Olivia did what basically every other dumb teenager does. And when we come out: phew, Eden's totally fine, and soon enough Olivia is deciding to get baptized after all! Which, it feels like, was probably always going to happen, and this detour into Eden's health was inserted to give the decision stakes.

And the coolest thing about it is that the producers -- and Olivia -- made it happen by using a baby as a human prop. Which I'm pretty sure isn't what Jesus would do. But I'm sure that, watching it back, everyone at the show was pretty proud and felt it was all worth it. Great season, everyone!