Lifetime's Beaches is the Diet Coke of Beaches

Full disclosure: I love the original Beaches, with Bette Midler (my queen) and Barbara Hershey and Barbara Hershey's 1980s botox lips and a wee pre-Blossom, pre-PhD, pre-Big Bang Theory Mayim Bialik as tweenage CC Bloom, stealing smokes on the beach and getting sand all over her kiddie-vaudville costume.Unsurprising spoiler alert:

Stage mother Leona becomes a frazzled shopkeep whose talented daughter panhandles without a permit rather than indulge in that old-time Hollywood tradition of working grueling hours in a dinky D-grade production in hopes of being "discovered."

[...] the half-orphaned daughter of a hugely successful attorney, Hilary's first moments on our screens are not spent wandering among the crowds in a tearful panic over losing track of her nanny/aunt, but are spent delighting in CC's (Idina Menzell) street show, having intentionally ditched her minders and the boring, stuffy world of being human baggage on another one of daddy's work trips, to get out there and slum it in the real world.

The question of gender roles -- that Hilary was expected to marry a handsome lawyer who worked for her dad and watch him grow into the leadership role daddy once occupied -- worked well in OG Beaches' 70s interlude but there's something to be said for the nuance in Lifetime's late 90s/early 00s portrayal of CC and Hilary's (Long) tumultuous 20s.

To say that CC suffers in comparison is unfortunate, because I really do enjoy what nu-Beaches does with it's revamp of Hilary Whitney-- allowing her to remain the more outwardly vulnerable and quiet of these two women while giving her a strength and fierceness of her own that was lost in the spectacle of CC.

CC though...okay, look, I'm really bitter about "Otto Titsling" not making the cut here, and "Oh Industry" being replaced by what reminded me of a music video I once saw at 6am on VH1 circa 1998, and CC's humiliating pre-stardom gig being reduced to a boring bar mitz