`Baby Brokers” (8 p.m. Monday, NBC-Ch. 5) is the second network movie in as many months to deal with the supreme emotional vulnerability of people desperately trying to adopt an infant.
In this instance, the would-be parent is a single woman, Debbie, played by Cybill Shepherd. Her unmarried status makes her more fragile to the scheming couple who take advantage of her. From the beginning, it’s a case of two against one, and much of the time she’s no match.
Even her job as social worker assigned to the L.A. police doesn’t make her any sharper in seeing through her victimizers’ charade or in pressing to seek justice for what turns out to be outlandish fraud.
In the beginning, all she sees is the hope they offer. At 42, after numerous miscarriages, Debbie accepts adoption as her only option, despite warnings from friends that single parenthood is no joyride.
Debbie knows only that she wants a baby more than anything she’s ever wanted in her life. When she meets with Leeanne (Nina Siemaszko) and Frankie, an Arkansas couple who have been living in Las Vegas, she thinks she has the answer.
Leeanne is pregnant and mother to an existing child with Down’s syndrome. The couple are too poor to care for any more kids, including their coming infant.
Through the agreement worked up by Debbie’s attorney, Debbie agrees to support the couple in an L.A. apartment until the baby is born. They quickly take advantage, lying and hitting Debbie for cash under the table and secretly negotiating with other couples elsewhere to scam more advance money.
When Debbie finally catches on, they flee, and subsequent investigations reveal they’ve left behind a trail of victims, as well as seven children given up for adoption over the years. Even the movie admits this is something of an extreme case.
Still, such victimization occurs, and childless couples-or would-be single parents, for that matter-need beware. Debbie’s agonies are multiple: She suffers the pain of a parent robbed of a child, even if, in her case, it’s an unborn one, while at the same time she endures the humiliation of a crime victim taken for a ride by ruthless con artists.
Shepherd is in some ways perfect for the part. She is television’s epitome of the strong-minded, independent single woman. But it also becomes clear, in one scene, why Shepherd rarely departs from her role as cool, collected princess. When her troubles cause her to curl up in a rocking chair and sob, she’s not particularly moving or convincing.
Meanwhile, the real acting standout proves to be Siemaszko as the baby-selling Leeanne, her kittenish, treacly, put-on Appalachian niceties gradually giving way to a scary criminal and borderline sociopath.
– “Secrets Revealed” (9 p.m. Wednesday, ABC-CH. 7) is a junky little special, but a rare and innocuous breath of fresh network programming during this dry Olympics vacuum.
Somewhat hyperbolically, we’re told by host William Devane in the intro that ominous forces tried to stop the programmers from unmasking some of these quick-take secrets. Well, the FBI, CIA and Mafia no doubt couldn’t care less.
But the special does romp through a dozen or so interesting cultural tidbits, such as how magicians saw people in half; how top-flight beauty contestants use pads and tapes to enhance their chances; and how NFL football players stoop to stinging ointments, injurious hand casts and nasty comments about wives to carry the gridiron day.
More innocuous are the looks at faces behind the voices of Tony the Tiger (Earl Ravenscroft) and Bart Simpson (Nancy Cartwright, who admits to her own Bart-like past, including suspension during her 7th-grade year).
– “Frontline: Red Flag Over Tibet” (9 p.m. Tuesday, PBS-Ch. 11) is a thorough look at the Chinese occupation of that graceful, windswept land, a documentary filled with gorgeous pictures taken of a society pounded by fierce, oppressive tyranny.
Nothing, we’re informed, is more antithetical than the external social engineering of Marxist communism and the inner pursuit of Tibet’s overriding religion, Buddhism. Journalist and author Orville Schell understatedly chronicles the decline in Tibet traditions that have accompanied the long Chinese occupation. Rare footage of the old Tibet back in the ’30s is revealingly juxtaposed with modern shots of a land that has all but lost its own identity.
