Lifetime’s Secrets In a Small Town: 3 things we learned about small towns

Another Saturday, another Lifetime thriller! Secrets in a Small Town is an intense mystery about a missing teenage girl and a mother’s desperation.

Tonight’s Lifetime thriller, Secrets in a Small Town, is about a frantic mother (played by Kate Drummond), in desperate search for her daughter, Sarah, after she goes out for one night with her new basketball teammates and doesn’t return home.

Supposedly, the movie is based on a true story, although I’m not sure which one since it sounds similar to several different cases. The film was originally titled Nowhere and made it’s debut at a Canadian Film Festival earlier this year.

Let’s recap some of the craziest “television small town” rules we learned about from this movie.

3. The cops are super bad at their jobs.

This is kind of a rule of thumb for all Lifetime movies but seemed particularly true in Secrets in a Small Town. The old-timer, Doug, doesn’t care about Sarah’s disappearance and refuses to listen to anything Claire says about her daughter’s normal behavior and the fact she’s not the type of person to miss curfew, run away without calling, or drink shots of vodka at a party.

Then there’s Deputy Rick, who is handsome and the nice cop in this scenario but he’s sort of a bumbling idiot. Claire is the one who has to take over the reigns of the investigation to find her daughter and by the time they do actually corner coach, RICK DOESN’T DO ANYTHING! Seriously!

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The coach is standing there, pointing a gun at Claire as she attempts to murder her daughter (that lady does not give up) and Rick has a gun on coach. He warns her several times to lower her weapon and she still doesn’t – yet Rick doesn’t take his shot despite it being wide open!

2. Local recreational sports team are super intense and partake in life-and-death hazing.

It always is the quiet ones right? It’s always the small towns with the most intensely disturbing hazing rituals. Sarah gets a taste of it when she makes the team. “Vipers” is a fitting name for those snakes. They invite Sarah for a little get together to “get to know her” when in reality, they tie her to a chair and force her to chug beer through a funnel while recording the whole thing.

Then they drag her, blindfolded, through the woods in the middle of the night towards “trust cliff”. The trust is, Sarah has to dangle over the edge with a rope and trust her teammates will pull her up. Except, Kat, the team captain and the coach’s daughter, accidentally-on-purpose, drops her over the edge.

They just leave her body there assuming she’s dead, come up with an elaborate lie that Sarah was a booze-hound who left early and try to cover their wrong-doing.

1. Don’t trust your local high school coach.

Speaking of, leave it to Coach Simmons to clean up their loose ends! During the hunt for Sarah, Ruth and her daughter find an abandoned shack. Guess whose inside? An incredibly weak and battered Sarah. She calls out for help but instead of lending a hand, Ruth locks the door and forces Kat to promise she won’t say anything.

Ruth would rather let Sarah die alone in the woods than to allow Kat to risk her future and career by letting the truth about the hazing incident get out. I mean honestly, the coach put Sarah on the team! If she didn’t want any extra competition she should have left Claire and Sarah alone. Instead, she tries to kill the girl and then return to the woods to finish her off and bury her body when Claire finally catches on to the scheme.

What were your favorite moments from Secrets in a Small Town? Did you anticipate the ending of the movie? What true story do you think it is based on? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!