TV Reviews : ‘First Stone’ Should Be Last Straw in Docudramas

We’re in dire need of a new definition of reality. It’s drifting away from us, what with government disinformation, tabloid TV, re-creation of true events for neo-news shows and just the general proliferation of docudramas.

Take “Cast the First Stone,” airing at 9 tonight on NBC. It’s “fact-based”; the announcement on screen says that the names and events have been changed.

You wonder what’s left after the facts are removed, although a network person assured us that the program is “extremely” true and did happen to an undesignated woman, and executive producer Sheri Singer collected her rights.

The story: A very virginal Diane (grimly but stalwartly played by Jill Eikenberry, happily pregnant on her “L.A. Law” series) is a former Catholic novice who just got a teaching job.

She picks up a hitchhiker, nice kid--who ends up raping her. And she’s pregnant.

She rejects abortion. She finally gives up on adoption and resolves to raise the baby herself.

The pinch-headed school board fires her for a variety of reasons, among them immorality and that single mothers can’t properly teach children. She fights in court and . . . well, you’ll have to wait.

The script by Brian Ross (no, not the Brian Ross who does fact-based investigations on NBC News) is one of those I’m-there-for-you, I-don’t-know-what-to-think-anymore, are-you-OK style of writing, and the direction by John Korty is likewise sloooooow.

Although these are “extremely” true but altered events, whatever that means, the movie rings false, and about the only merit is the collision of dialectics on the right of life and the right of choice.