Betty and Coretta

When Lifetime first announced it in May 2012 it was called 'Parallel Lives', which is also the title it goes by in Spanish, but it ended up airing in the US as 'Betty and Coretta'. Directed by Yves Simoneau, the TV film tells the story of the friendship between Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz, the widows of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, two women left alone with their children and their husbands' legacies.

It opens in 1965. Coretta (Angela Bassett) listens warily as Malcolm X tells a church crowd to fight back if they're attacked, while her own husband sticks to nonviolent protest. Weeks later Malcolm is shot dead in front of his family, and Betty (Mary J. Blige) is left with four little girls, pregnant with twins, with hardly any money and a surname plenty of people are afraid of. Three years later it's Coretta's turn.

From there the film covers nearly three decades. Betty goes back to school and ends up teaching at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn; Coretta campaigns to make King's birthday a national holiday and has to deal with the FBI tapes of her husband's affairs. Their paths keep crossing, and what starts as two widows leaning on each other becomes a real friendship. Ruby Dee, who knew both men, appears on screen as a witness and bridges the jumps in time.

Bassett had already played Betty Shabazz in Spike Lee's 'Malcolm X', winning an NAACP Image Award for it, so here she switches sides. Blige is an executive producer as well as the star. Shem Bitterman and Ron Hutchinson wrote the script, and Gloria Reuben plays Myrlie Evers-Williams, Medgar Evers' widow. Simoneau had already made 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' and 'Ruffian' for television. It premiered on 2 February 2013 to lukewarm reviews, averaging 48.3 out of 100 across six outlets on the site: Bassett got most of the praise and Blige most of the doubts. The family wasn't won over either. Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Betty's daughters, called it "fiction" and said nobody had consulted them.

• Biography
• Drama