• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 10, 2025

Lifetime refers to its series of occasional made-for-TV movies about prominent figures in headline-making situations as its “ ‘I Am/I Was’ biopic franchise.”

Its newest entry was announced this week. The subject? Honey Boo Boo. Her TV movie gets an “I Was” title, as in “I Was Honey Boo Boo.”

The past tense in the title is purposeful. It signifies that Honey Boo Boo’s personal story of sudden child stardom more than a decade ago is past history for 19-year-old Alana Thompson, the young woman who “was” Honey Boo Boo, but “is” not anymore.

Like the other movies in the “I Am/I Was” franchise, Alana narrates her story from her own point of view as the story is being dramatized by actors in a scripted TV movie.

They play the key roles of Honey Boo Boo (Vale Cooper as young Honey Boo Boo and Isabelle Ayres as older Alana), her mother, June (Chelsea Larkin), her older sister, Pumpkin (Mia Turley as the younger Pumpkin and Georgia Small as the older), and Alana’s father known as Sugar Bear (Neil Chinneck). The movie premieres May 17.

As almost everyone knows who was alive in 2012-14 for the four seasons of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” on TLC, Honey Boo Boo was the family nickname for six-year-old Alana Thompson.

She was a cherubic girl whose attention-getting precocity on another TLC show, “Toddlers & Tiaras,” about beauty pageants held mostly in the South with little-girl contestants, led to her own show. 

The pageants and the show were controversial, with critics decrying the way little girls were coached to cavort on-stage like grown-up pageant participants.

Nevertheless, Alana was such a standout that she won her own show with her name in the title, “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” which centered on her home life with her family in rural McIntyre, Georgia.

The show made stars of Honey Boo Boo and her mother June, known as “Mama June.”

At her peak, Honey Boo Boo was probably the best-known child star in America as she made the rounds of the late-night shows and was talked about constantly on the entertainment-news shows and in the tabloids.

But fame was fleeting. And now, grown-up Alana is reportedly a nursing student at Regis University in Denver. She has had occasional TV appearances too, most notably on “The Masked Singer” in 2021.

“I Was Honey Boo Boo” is the fifth movie in the Lifetime “I Am/I Was” series. The four others included two “I Am” movies and two “I Was” movies.

In “I Am Elizabeth Smart” (2017), Smart narrated a dramatization of her 2002 kidnapping at age 14. 

Victoria Gotti, the daughter of Mafia don John Gotti, told her story in “I Am Victoria Gotti” (2019), although the movie may have gone by another name.

The two others were “I Was Lorena Bobbit” (2020), featuring the woman who made national headlines after she cut off her husband’s penis in 1993, and “I Was Octomom,” which aired earlier this year.

“Octomom” was the name given by the tabloids to Natalie Suleman, who drew national attention when she gave birth to octuplets in January 2009.

She became an international media sensation because the birth represented the first time in human history that a woman gave birth to octuplets and all of them survived.