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Pasco News: Is It Just Life Or 'Lifetime'?

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By TOM JACKSON

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: February 22, 2009

In a week shot through with oddities, peculiarities and assorted other "how 'bout that" moments - and that's not even bringing up the mummified pygmy mud-man exhibit at the county fair - these several emerged as worth something more than a passing noggin-scratch.

Wind-whipped wildfires threaten homes. All of a sudden, we're Santa Barbara? The county sues to put an end to randy activities at a Port Richey "swingers club." OK. So, no, we're not Santa Barbara.

Perhaps, instead, we are the mobile home community just down the street from Wisteria Lane, and rather than desperate housewives, we have impulsive long-term girlfriends. And here, after our long establishing shot, is where we settle.

I mean, you can't very well let Thursday's acquittal of a so-called stabbing victim's drug-abusing girlfriend go without observing that, with or without exoneration, Linda Callam's chosen path may well have qualified as Lifetime movie material.

It practically writes itself!

Female roofer endures years of domestic thuggery to live in a trailer park with a heavy-drinking drug dealer and his revolving cast of ne'er-do-well compadres. Heated intellectual disputes that sometimes boil over into escalating physical violence punctuate the relationship.

At the moment of ultimate crisis, cornered in the kitchen and responding to the beating at hand and countless beatings past, she plunges a steak knife into her longtime lover's chest. (Let that be a lesson to all who bully their domestic partners: Avoid rooms where sharp objects are within easy reach.)

'Burning Bed' Redux

The man with the alliterative name, Paul Pullins, extracts the knife, exits to the front yard and plops down in a lawn chair, where he expires. You absolutely cannot make this stuff up.

Investigators doubt her self-defense story. She's arrested. Now, improbably, the thing gains momentum. Did no one see "The Burning Bed"?

Basing a deliciously overzealous prosecution substantially on the shape-shifting testimony of the dead man's partner in an illegal business activity, state attorney takes loser case to trial, which lasts three days. Jurors deliberate fewer than 120 minutes, which is barely long enough to get a suit Martinized, but not so short as to suggest the panel thought the whole affair was an utter waste of their time.

All our story needs is a convenient romance to some likeable, law-abiding fellow, an uplifting denouement to reassure the viewer that this unlikely heroine, in whom we will have invested the better part of an entire weeknight, will find redemption.

Details, Details

Casting the leads could be tricky. Who's desperate enough to want to play Pullins, the lowlife who deals drugs and whacks women? You have to believe there are some parts even Tim Matheson won't do. Maybe Scott Bakula? How about Michael Moriarty? He's good at malevolence.

And whom do you see as our beleaguered Linda Callam? I'm partial to Mary McDowell ("Independence Day," "Battlestar Gallactica") as someone who could do damaged-but-tough, but I'm open to suggestion, so long as it's not Judith Light.

Now all we need is a working title. "Moon Lake Madness"? Too generic. "He Had It Comin'"? Maybe. "A Stab In The Dark"? Hmmmm.

Yep. Another remarkable week - this one more remarkable than most - has passed in the county that doubles as Jerry Springer's green room. Makes you eager to see what next week brings.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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