Gracie's Choice

Gracie Thompson is 17 and has been through so many schools she's lost count. She's been mothering her younger siblings for years, because their real mother is too busy with drugs and whichever boyfriend she's with that month. 'Gracie's Choice' is a Lifetime TV movie inspired by a true story first told in Reader's Digest, written by Joyce Eliason and directed by Peter Werner, who'd won an Oscar for a short film back in the 1970s.

Kristen Bell plays Gracie and Anne Heche is Rowena, a mother of five whose kids all have different fathers, and who drags them from town to town behind whichever biker has caught her eye. When she's arrested again the children are split up, and Gracie and her sister Rose (Kristin Fairlie) end up in juvenile hall. Their grandmother Louela (Diane Ladd) gets the family back together, but she's hardly a safe pair of hands: she believes every promise her daughter makes and passes her the money the state pays for the kids.

Meanwhile Gracie waits tables at a diner, tries to pull her grades up under a guidance counsellor who won't let anything slide, and starts seeing Tommy (Shedrack Anderson III), a classmate from a well-off family. When social services threaten to send her brothers to different foster homes, she digs her heels in and asks to be emancipated and given custody of all three boys. The judge isn't convinced, and wants proof that she can pay rent, hold down a job, keep up at school and raise them all at once.

Lifetime premiered it in the US on 12 January 2004, and 4.2 million people watched that night. Bell was still months away from 'Veronica Mars', the show that made her a star that autumn, while Heche earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie, losing to Mary-Louise Parker for 'Angels in America'. Critics mostly talked about the two of them, and the four reviews collected on the site average 73.8 out of 100.

• Drama