Little Mystery, Less Substance in ‘Blind Faith’

February is mayhem month, another ratings period when the motto for much of television is: You kill ‘em, we’ll thrill ‘em. Sohhhhh . . . we’re on the murder beat again.

Just why NBC thought “Blind Faith” would be worth four hours of anyone’s time, however, is far more mysterious than why New Jersey insurance man Rob Marshall clumsily left behind a thick residue of incriminating evidence in arranging the murder of his wife, Maria.

The impact of the slaying and Marshall’s central role in it are the crux of this dreary, unchallenging two-part re-creation that airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday on Channels 4, 36 and 39. As always with docudrama, at least some skepticism is advised.

It’s 1984, and the Marshalls, of Toms River, N.J., are not simply the All-American family, they’re All-World: Rob (Robert Urich) is a super salesman, Maria (Joanna Kerns) a super mom and teen-aged Roby (David Barry Gray), Chris (Jay Underwood) and John (Johnny Galecki) super sons. This group is strictly upper-middle class, cocooned in a fancy house and a life style of country club socializing.

Then the shock: As the perfect couple are returning one night from dinner at an Atlantic City casino, Rob pulls into a secluded rest area along the New Jersey Parkway, evidently to check a bad tire. Later, the highway patrol discovers him beside the car with his head bloodied. Inside, Maria is dead, shot in the back. While bent over the tire, Rob claims, he was slugged from behind and knocked out, awakening later to find $800 missing from his wallet and the body of his wife in the passenger seat.

Then the revelations: It seems that Marshall had wanted to leave his wife for his secret mistress of two years (Robin Strasser). It seems that he had enormous gambling debts. It seems that he had taken out $1.5 million in insurance on Maria’s life, the last $100,000 signed for on the day of her death. And what’s more, it seems that he made scores of calls--all routinely logged by the telephone company--to a suspicious hardware store in Shreveport, La. Instead of feigning sorrow over Maria, moreover, he publicly wallows in self pity, tearfully blubbering about being temporarily cut off from his girlfriend. And on and on he goes, incredibly, at once proclaiming his innocence and raising powerful doubts about his innocence.

As an investigating cop observes: “This guy’s gotta be innocent. Nobody could be this stupid.”

You’re thinking the same thing as you watch “Blind Faith,” at first confident that you’re being drawn in by a slick story that at any moment will veer sharply, confident that something will happen to exonerate this slug. But it doesn’t.

He is that stupid.

John Gay’s script traps Urich in a character of such minuscule scale that there’s little room for him to breathe, let alone give a performance. The only arresting moments here surface in the interaction among Gray, Underwood and Galecki as the sons, each devastated in a different way by this case and the machinations of their father, now a death row inmate in New Jersey. Gray and Underwood, in particular, are excellent.

As the story plods through the inevitable trial en route to an inglorious conclusion, however, director Paul Wendkos belabors the agonies of the sons so heavy-handedly that you feel as manipulated as you do sympathetic.

“Blind Faith” is drawn from the book of the same title by Joe McGinniss, whose account of the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, “Fatal Vision,” was the basis of another, much better NBC miniseries, also written by Gay. MacDonald--convicted in the slaying of his pregnant wife and two young daughters, which he had blamed on hippie intruders--was apparently a much more complex and enigmatic character than Marshall, and thus was surrounded by a thicker aura of mystery.

This latest NBC drama also invites comparison with this week’s CBS miniseries, “Family of Spies,” whose real-life protagonist, John Walker, was portrayed as an amoral, greed-driven criminal who exploited his children for personal gain as coldly and calculatingly as Marshall did his sons. But Walker, too, was more interesting than Marshall, and the account of his spying for the Soviet Union and its crushing impact on his family was staged far more compellingly than “Blind Faith” depicts Marshall’s lumbering saga.

Hinted at, but barely touched on in NBC’s version of “Blind Faith” is the sub-text of a materialistic, essentially empty yuppie existence in Toms River that seems to be reflected in the lives of the Marshalls and their friends. Exploring that could have elevated “Blind Faith” above its monotonous crime-story plateau to the higher ground of social commentary.

Instead, “Blind Faith” equals flawed vision.