“AS IS,” Sunday, 9 p.m., Showtime cable--This...

“AS IS,” Sunday, 9 p.m., Showtime cable--This is TV’s most affecting, most honest AIDS story yet, a tenderly crafted version of William M. Hoffman’s Broadway play about loyalty, friendship and love.

Robert Carradine plays a gay AIDS victim who is taken in and cared for by his former lover, played by Jonathan Hadary. Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, whose TV credits include the stunning “Brideshead Revisited,” exploits the TV advantages of location shooting without diminishing intimacy. And the performances are excellent, especially by Hadary, who re-creates his award-winning

stage role of Saul for TV. There’s also nice supporting work by Joanna Miles and by Colleen Dewhurst as a hospice worker.

TV has always welcomed stories about afflictions. For a long time, though, AIDS was invisible on the small screen.

One reason was that AIDS was medically baffling, hence outside TV drama’s law of resolution that demanded tidy endings. Another was that AIDS seemed to be always terminal, conflicting with another TV requirement that stories about the afflicted end on a note of hope or inspiration. And finally, the majority of AIDS victims in theUnited States were male homosexuals, astigmatized minority still regarded by some traditionalists as a TV danger zone.

That attitude began to soften amid increasing news stories about AIDS and reports of its increasing danger to heterosexuals. The biggest step, though, was last year’s “An Early Frost,” NBC’s wise and sensitive movie about a man who, in telling his family that he has AIDS, also must reveal that he is gay.

Now comes “As Is,” one of those rare stories written for the stage that also translate well on TV. Its appearance on cable-delivered Showtime is a mixed blessing. The result is more truth and less compromise than would have been the case on regular TV, where such things as gay embraces are usually considered too “delicate” for the camera. Yet “As Is” also deserves a wider audience than it will get on cable.

Highly recommended viewing.