The Lifetime Website Description:
Tonight on Lifetime:  Lynda Carter, Sally Field, Meredith Baxter, Tori Spelling, Michael Gross, John Ritter, James Eckhouse, and Joe Don Baker star in Secret Hidden Mysterious Desires: Not Withstanding My Daughter's Husband's Tragic Betrayal, the Mary Smith-Basset Conners Joclyn Edgett Story.  This film, loosely inspired by a plot based on a screenplay taken from a fictional account of a movie retold to an individual whose life is built around a true story, is the harrowing, moving, chilling, yet inspiring tale of a woman named Mary who finds the strength to deal with heartache and loss.  After the film, log on to an interactive Web chat among people who've seen the movie but on whom it probably is not based.

The TV Guide Half-Page Feature Description:
Mary (Lynda Carter), head of her own support group for wives whose husbands have faked their deaths and moved on to start bigamous relationships with new families those scoundrel husbands like better, learns that something tragic has happened:  Her second husband (Michael Gross), who has a rare chronic condition that causes him to combust should his skin be exposed to sunlight, has left his family to move in with the home care provider (Sally Field) who applies his prescription sunblock three times daily.  While leaving the home, however, brief exposure to ultraviolet rays has caused Mary's husband to run off, suffer amnesia, take up with a misunderstood bulimic stripper (Meredith Baxter, who happens to have a heart of gold and an endless capacity for caring and who only works as a stripper to pay for dialysis for her conjoined twin boys Allen and Alex, both of whom are dyslexic and in desperate need of a nurturing father figure), and die under mysterious circumstances that might indicate murder.

The detective (Joe Don Baker) investigating the death falls madly in love with Mary's daughter (Tori Spelling), a girl with horribly low self-esteem who is in her late twenties and working as a prostitute by night while still attending high school by day.  Mary's daughter's third husband (John Ritter) in turn falls in love with the cross-dressing pool boy (Clint Howard, in his most notable cameo to date).  When her husband runs off and is never heard from again, Mary is driven into the arms of the surprisingly well-rounded, impossibly decent, washed-up astrophysicist (James Eckhouse) who lives in the dumpster behind a local diner.  He, in turn, must help her cope with the ghosts of her past while they face the trials of her future and struggle to keep the pool skimmed.  Closed captioned.

The Syndicated TV Critic Description:
Tonight's least nauseating fare, among a lineup of sitcoms that make me want to murder my family in their sleep before taking my own life with a pair of topiary shears, is Lifetime's latest Lynda Carter movie.  I particularly like the scene in which Carter and her daughter are driving in Carter's SUV.  Carter stops periodically to speak to dirty, reeking homeless men she encounters.

"Excuse me," she says to each, batting impossibly long eyelashes behind tasteful glasses, "but would you consider coming home with me and impressing me with your surprisingly gentle, supportive treatment of my children and me, slowly working your way into my heart until I declare my love for you despite whatever shadows may lurk in your past threatening to disrupt whatever happiness we eventually manage to forge for each other?"

Without doubt the best moment in this otherwise execrable film, though it is slightly less execrable than every other film on cable television tonight, is when the homeless man played by Tony Todd (Candyman, Night of the Living Dead) answers Carter's character.

"Sorry, lady," he rumbles, "But I can't.  I'm waiting for a chance encounter with my ex-wife, who will discover that I've fallen so far since she left me over my drinking problem that I'm finally ready to change and become the sort of husband she deserves, though I will have to struggle to regain the trust of my estranged son, who believes my drinking was his fault and who has since announced that he is gay.  After we remarry I will be very busy helping my wife overcome her depression and cope with her Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  Maybe you could try the dumpster behind Denny's down the block."

Maybe If I tried that dumpster, I could find a movie that didn't make me pray for the sweet, sweet release of death.