SHHH: Susan Lucci hosts ID’s “Deadly Affairs.” (Sam Baird)
SHHH: Susan Lucci hosts ID’s “Deadly Affairs.” (
)
And you thought Erica Kane was gone for good! In fact, like every soap character who ever died only to rise again like a pack of demented Jesuses, Erica is back from the land of dead TV programs.
While it’s Susan Lucci who hosts ID’s newest true crime show, “Deadly Affairs,” premiering Saturday night, she’s doing it in character. No, Erica Kane is never mentioned by name, but clearly it’s Erica behind that sarong, poolside.
On each episode, Lucci narrates the details both on-screen and in voice-over during reenactments, of two different affairs that ended in murder. While I would have loved to see Lucci actually acting out the murders herself, she simply narrates in character.
It probably would have been preferable for Lucci to narrate as herself, but clearly the producers thought the Erica character was much more evil than good wife Lucci and the narration is sexed up, and as ironic as the dialogue in one of those Roman epics where no one speaks in anything but irony.
On Saturday night’s premiere, Erica first narrates “In Too Deep” about playboy mortician, Michael Roseboro, who was having such a hot-and-heavy affair with a married soccer mom that he was driven to knock his wife, Jan, over the head and then drown her in the family backyard pool. In the house she grew up in!
Despite handling dead bodies for a living, Roseboro was such a moron that he didn’t do the job right, and when EMS arrived Jan was still clinging to life with clear evidence of having struggled. He didn’t bother to follow the ambulance to the hospital, and she died alone in the ER an hour after he threw her, unconscious, into the pool.
The second story took place way back in the late 1970s — even though it was just solved a few years ago.
This one is deliciously slimy because it involved Melinda and David Harmon, who met at a church camp. They married at 20 and were supposed to live a good and Christian life. She got her school-boy lover to murder her husband, and then she and the lover split up immediately thereafter. Both went on to live successful and very wealthy lives — until the cops came calling more than 30 years later.
Lucci plays it campy and fun, and gets to say ridiculous things like, “The church secretary had a body made for more than just praying!”
And my personal favorite: “Like my second husband said — or was it third? — there’s no shame in enjoying the finer things in life, but it’s best to enjoy them one at a time.” Or in this case, two crimes at a time.