TV Reviews : Baxter Bristles in Return as ‘Betty Broderick’

Betty Broderick is back. Even behind bars, there’s no confining this woman to one movie.

“Her Final Fury: Betty Broderick, the Last Chapter” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS, Channels 2 and 8) finds Meredith Baxter, in another bristling portrayal, continuing the pathetic yet fascinating saga of the former socialite-turned-double murderess.

You might have thought that the docudrama seen last February--about her fairy-tale married life, violent divorce and bloody vengeance on her ex-husband and his new wife as they slept in their marital bed--would have put a cap on the story. But Broderick’s spirited courtroom defense, pitting herself as the victim of spousal abuse, touched such a national nerve that CBS reportedly committed to a sequel even before shooting the first movie (“A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story,” which garnered Baxter an Emmy nomination).

Broderick’s claims of emotional abuse, her narcissism and her chilling lack of remorse are the thrust of the sequel. In fact, in one of those revealing throwaway lines that illuminate character, Broderick, right after slaying her victims, asks her daughter to go home and fetch her fingernail file box in preparation for turning herself in.

In the first movie, Broderick was a raving, jealous harridan who appeared to drive her husband into the arms of another woman. In this, her lockup frenzy, she drives her captors crazy.

Baxter, padded up, is again an uncanny physical and emotional mirror of her subject--hard, manipulative, relentless, consumed with righteous fever.

Writer Joe Cacaci and director Dick Lowry, both back from the first movie, deftly dovetail alternating flashbacks of the murder with Broderick’s two trials, the first a mistrial followed by her conviction in a second trial that is dramatized as a gamble going in.

The fact that the outcome is a given doesn’t lessen the drama, largely because Broderick and Baxter are such a match. As for any likelihood of “Betty Broderick, Part Three,” the chances look slim, at least until she becomes eligible for parole, which will be in March, 2011.