TV Reviews : ‘Family for Joe’ Puts Unlikely Twist on Mary Poppins

Robert Mitchum boggles the mind as a crusty, grizzled sort of Mary Poppins in the TV movie “A Family for Joe” (Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39), the pilot for a series that NBC will show later this spring.

Mitchum takes on the nanny role in this unlikely story about four upscale orphans who hire a derelict to live with them as their grandfather, so they won’t have to go to foster homes.

Joe (Mitchum), unshaven and dirty, former resident of a cardboard box, moves into the orphans’ comfortable suburban house and, surprise, he cleans up nicely. Underneath the grime is a strong, ex-merchant marine (and ex-alcoholic, reassuringly sober for years), who settles down with only token protest to take his grandfathering seriously.

Watching requires blanket disbelief and a high tolerance for heartstring tugging: Will 6-year-old Mary, silent since her parents’ death, ever speak again? Will teen-age Nick decide drugs are wrong? Will Christopher’s accident keep Joe from leaving? Will they all become a real family at last?

Writer Arnold Margolin and director Jeffrey Melman telegraph the answers in traditional small-screen style. It’s Mitchum’s laconic, larger-than-life presence that doesn’t quite fit their formula. Known for his supermacho movie roles, he looks as if he’d wandered onto the wrong sound stage and decided to hang around for kicks.

Viewers may find it worth hanging around just to see him loll in a bubble bath chewing a big, ugly cigar or to hear him object to a skeptical social worker (Barbara Babcock) as “some highfalutin broad” and inform the bereft orphans, “I ain’t Santa Claus.”