TV REVIEW : ‘WORDS BY HEART’

“Wonderworks,” public television’s dramatic anthology series for children, has been a welcome addition to the prime-time viewing menu this season, but it stumbles badly tonight (7:30 p.m., Channel 50; 8 p.m. Channels 28, 15).

The two-part “Words by Heart” is poorly written and tepidly executed. Worse than that, however, is an ending that is downright distressing.

Based on a 1979 novel by Ouida Sebestyen, “Words by Heart” is the story of a black girl whose family has moved from the South to a small, previously all-white town in Missouri in 1910. Fran Robinson stars as the girl, Lena, with Robert Hooks and Alfre Woodard as her parents, Charlotte Rae as a rich, eccentric widow for whom Lena’s father works, and Ed Call as a stereotypical redneck.

The characters are incomplete, relationships go unexplored, promising story lines peter out. And then, near the end of the film, Lena comes upon her father, mortally wounded by a gunshot fired by a young white man, who lies injured nearby. Incredibly, the father orders his daughter not only to help the other man but also to keep secret about his crime. She obeys.

The motives for their extraordinary decisions are exasperatingly unclear. Counseling against revenge is one thing; instructing the girl not to report what she knows to the proper authorities in the hope that justice will be served is quite another. The program’s last scene suggests there may have been a benefit to her silence, but it is so obtuse as to be meaningless.