TV Reviews : ‘Silence’ a Dark and Deadly Docudrama on Incest

Producer Robert Greenwald, whose previous TV movies have dealt with such subjects as wife beating, alcoholism and age discrimination, tackles another tale from the dark side Sunday in “A Deadly Silence” (9 p.m. on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

This time the topic is incest. And more. It’s incest compounded by the victim hiring a high school pal for $1,000 to kill her father.

And it’s true. It’s based on New York Times feature writer Dena Kleiman’s 1988 book of the same name on the grim events of 1986 in Selden, Long Island. The abuse began when Cheryl Pierson was 11. Then, just turned 16, she feared that her 8-year-old sister would take her place in her father’s affections. She beseeched her classmate to kill the father.

The film of the events--as executive produced by Greenwald and Jennifer Miller, directed with restraint and invention by John Patterson and written by Miller--is a scarifying document.

The mystery isn’t much, except that we’re still not precisely certain that Cheryl was telling the whole truth. But the impact of the story lies in the fact that, of all the people who knew Cheryl, with all the evidence that there was something untoward between father and daughter, only one of Cheryl’s girlfriends tried to alert anybody. Therein lies the “silence” of the title.

For star power, the producers used Charles Haid as James Pierson, Mike Farrell as Cheryl’s attorney, Sally Struthers as James’ sister and Bruce Weitz as a detective.

But these roles are incidental to newcomer Heather Fairfield’s Cheryl. She portrays a tantalizing woman-child, which is contrasted sharply with the despair of being 16 and carrying the burden of the world. She expresses an affecting range--anger, self-confidence, hurt, pathos, warmth and coldness.

“A Deadly Silence” doesn’t explore James Pierson and his anguish and how he came to it. That’s an important oversight. But it’s still deadly docudrama--and it should be all the more potent when the network displays the 24-hour National Child Abuse Hotline number, 800-4-A-CHILD, signifying that abuse is true and silence isn’t an answer.