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October 22 - 28, 2023 • Terre Haute Tribune-Star • 9 Melissa Joan Hart has enjoyed switching things up in her career, and she clearly enjoys continuing to do so. The actress who established herself as a young star in the series "Clarissa Explains It All" and "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" has moved regularly between comedy and drama, and also between performing and directing (sometimes doing both at once). Her yen for trying dif- ferent sorts of projects is clear again as she stars in the fact-inspired Lifetime movie "Would You Kill for Me? The Mary Bailey Story," debuting Saturday, Oct. 28. As she has done on many of her projects, Hart also serves as an executive producer on the film, in which she plays the matriarch of a family whose women suffer the alcohol-fueled abuse of an outsider. Hart's character Ella sees her daughter Veronica (played by Olivia Scriven) marry Willard (Connor McMahon), whose behavior gets steadily worse – one major indi- cation being his affair with Veronica's best friend, who becomes pregnant by him. Ella's young granddaughter Mary (Presley Allard) also is subjected to the turmoil, until one night that ends fatally. "Would You Kill for Me? The Mary Bailey Story" takes a "Rashomon"-like approach, showing the events from the perspective of each of the female relatives. As the story unfolds, the audience is invited to guess who committed the killing, with that person's identity revealed at the end of the movie. Obviously, this is heavy territory for Hart, but she's been tackling challenging material since the time she was particularly popular with young viewers for her weekly television work. During that period, she portrayed a young woman who manipulated her boy- friend against her parents in "Twisted Desire" (1996), one of several people left at the mercy of the sea by a yacht mishap in "Two Came Back" (1997), and a college journalist probing her best friend's assault in "Silencing Mary" (1998). However, around the same time, Hart still played into her sunnier image in the romantic-comedy theat- rical feature "Drive Me Crazy" (1999) and a couple of "Sabrina" TV-movies set in Rome (1998) and Australia (1999). When the "Sabrina" series ended in 2003, she began to delve more fully into mature material, notably including a 2007 episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." She even got to be rather spicy in some of her routines as a Season 9 "Dancing With the Stars" contestant in 2009. Directing also has been part of Hart's menu since 2005, when she guided her younger sister Emily in the short film "Mute." She also directed several times on her later series "Melissa & Joey," and she has called the shots on such Lifetime features as "The Santa Con" (2014), "The Watcher in the Woods" " (2017), "Feliz NaviDAD" (2020) and "Santa Bootcamp" (2022).' Now, with "Would You Kill for Me? The Mary Bai- ley Story," Hart returns to a network she knows well … but with some different twists as an actress, a cus- tomary move for her. spotlight BY JAY BOBBIN Melissa Joan Hart in "Would You Kill for Me? The Mary Bailey Story" Melissa Joan Hart is privy to a murder in true Lifetime drama Julie Chen Moonves from "Big Brother" Sunday on CBS Q: It's good to see "All Rise" back on the air, but is this going to be the end of the show? – Mike Lang, via e-mail A: From all appearances, it is. That wasn't complete- ly unexpected, given that it took roughly a year for OWN to bring the show back for the second half of its third (and, ultimately, final) season – and that third year came as a reprieve for the law drama after CBS cancelled it following its first two rounds. The series' budget wasn't the same at OWN as it was at CBS, and especially given the large ensemble cast (which has included Simone Missick, Wilson Bethel, Jessica Camacho and Mar Helgenberger), that had to be a factor in whether it would win another renewal. One hesitates to say "never," but given the situation of "All Rise" itself plus the larger issues related to pro- duction and money matters in the age of the entertain- ment-industry strikes, it's likely that "All Rise" has risen for the last time. celebritypipeline BY JAY BOBBIN Send questions of general interest via email to tvpipeline@gmail.com. Writers must include their names, cities and states. Personal replies cannot be sent.