TV Reviews : ‘Promise’ a High-Level Soap Opera

Beyond finding the obvious audience of Dana Delany fans, the drama “A Promise to Keep” (tonight at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39) should prove useful to anyone in need of a strong antidote to repeated “Brady Bunch” reruns, with its trenchant message that two families aren’t always better than one.

This is as much a yuppie nightmare as “Pacific Heights”: the unplanned expansion of the carefully controlled nuclear family. Delany is a mother of three whose happy marriage and career are threatened when she unexpectedly inherits four more charges. Her husband’s sister has scarcely announced her terminal disease when, in a worst-case scenario, the widower-to-be also suddenly perishes in an accident, leaving a quartet of orphans to be taken in.

Seven is much more than enough. The oldest nephew is a pyromaniac who won’t say grace. The baby bangs his head bloody in inarticulate grief. Delany quits her job to be a full-time mom, heightening cash-flow problems, while her increasingly bitter husband, well-played by William Russ, suffers writer’s block as the expanded brood plays noisily outside.

Delany is the main attraction here, getting to expand on her “China Beach” qualities--even more sexy, even more maternal. She’s so radiant in both modes that male fans may not know whether they want her as their love slave or mommy. If anything, she’s a bit too radiant; the script might have been better if this madonna figure had had a few qualms or selfish moments, instead of letting her husband carry all that weight.

“A Promise to Keep” is soap opera on a fairly high level, realistic and involving. Its lack of an ending may be its weakest link; after all the preceding travails, offering mere stick-to-it-iveness as the cure--however valid--can’t help but seem anti-climactic.