TV REVIEW : ‘THIS CHILD’: A SIMPLE TALE

“This Child Is Mine,” a movie airing at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39, plays like a yuppie-family version of “Love Story”: couple can’t have baby, couple finally adopts baby, couple loves baby . . . until fate intervenes to spoil their happiness.

The story is that sappy and that simple, a tale of good and bad with Lindsay Wagner and Chris Sarandon as the perfect parents and Nancy McKeon as the unemployed, unwed teen-ager who voluntarily gives up her daughter for adoption and then selfishly files suit to get her back.

Why is she willing to sustain this fight for two years? How is she able to afford it? Why doesn’t she just have another child? Good questions. Don’t look for answers, though. What would be an emotionally wrenching, life-changing experience for both sides comes off in this well-intentioned NBC presentation as a boring, mushy treatise on the fundamental truth that love, not blood, is the best ingredient for making a family.