Drew Peterson: Untouchable

In October of 2007 when Drew Peterson’s wife Stacy went missing, we in the Chicagoland area got to hear it first as nothing more than a missing person story. Bolingbrook was a stone’s throw away from my Chicago suburb, and as the story slowly grew into a national media frenzy, it was all the more amusing because it was so close to home.

The Drew Peterson story wasn’t just an amusing media frenzy; it was OUR media frenzy, and the story just kept getting better and better.

It hit a peak when not only was there to be a Lifetime movie about Peterson, Saturday night’s “Drew Peterson: Untouchable,” but the head scratcher Rob Lowe was cast and looked surprisingly good as the former police officer.

Watching “Untouchable” was for me a strange, almost perverse guilty pleasure of feeling closer to this scandal than any other. I did not expect to find deep insight, humanization or answers in of all things a Lifetime movie, but this bland, boring and bullheaded TV movie does little other than dramatize the whole media circus into a condensed, two-hour soap.

Even on a trashy level, it pales in comparison to the ongoing amusement that was, and is, Drew Peterson’s story.

Part of what makes it so uninteresting is “Untouchable’s” shocking inaccuracy and its horribly skewered timeline. The film substitutes out actual human dialogue for extended plot exposition and melodrama. All the instances of a crazed Kathleen Savio screeching about Drew’s marital oddities and infidelity or all of Drew’s flirting and courtship are character development lite.

Within minutes of Drew’s first fling with Stacy (Kaley Cuoco), she’s pregnant, married to Drew and fearing for her life. Something this rudimentary shouldn’t be this hard to follow. Why does Drew leap from a caring boyfriend to jealous husband without reason?

The confusing execution continues like this, even as it liberally uses “Today Show” clips to set the scene, so at the very least you hope the film would devolve into total campiness. And yet, aside from the meme-worthy garage scene in which Drew says to his neighbor, “I’m untouchable, bitch,” there is hardly a single interesting or even off the wall idiotic thought coming from these characters’ mouths.

Lowe is coasting through the role with an accent borrowed not from the CPD but from William H. Macy in “Fargo.” He does act as strangely congenial as the real Peterson always did in front of the media, but his performance is no revelation.

Again, I’m not sure what I expected from this film. I expected it to be a riot, and even though Peterson himself called Lowe’s performance “hysterical,” this is too generically bad even for Lifetime standards.