TV Reviews : ‘Onion Field’ Touch to ‘Cop for the Killing’

The TV movie “In the Line of Duty: A Cop for the Killing” (Sunday at 9 p.m. on NBC Channels 4, 36, 39) doesn’t quite know whether it wants to be “The Onion Field” or “The A-Team.”

Its ostensible subject is the grief affecting other cops after a policeman’s murder. But, unfortunately, the ambushed officer who goes down in a hail of bullets--Charles Haid (“Hill Street Blues”)--is by far the most believable one on screen, and after he’s gone we scarcely have enough invested in his cartoonish partners to care about how they work through their pain and reintegrate into the undercover narcotics squad.

There’s a stereotypical internal affairs investigative unit that tries to ply the surviving members apart. And they have their own problems: Lieutenant Wiltern (James Farentino) feels guilt over initiating the drug bust that led to the murder. Matt (Steven Weber), the longhair on the narc detail, is starting to act as spaced-out as the druggies he’s supposed to be arresting, and keeps showing up at strip joints instead of work.

Less problematic for the team, but more for realism-oriented viewers, is gorgeous Julie (Susan Walters), who’s way too fabulous a babe to be doing this grunt-work; she should be posing for swimsuit issues, not knocking down doors downtown. Charlie’s Angels live!

How do they deal with their grief? Ultimately, by telling each other things like “Sometimes things just happen” or “You just gotta deal with it ,” whatever that means, followed by finally going out and seriously kicking some drug-dealer butt.

It takes the message in the final freeze-frame--”Last year in the U.S., 145 officers were killed in the line of duty”--to remind you how serious this all is supposed to be.

The script by Philip Rosenberg and Rick Husky offers nothing but cliches, but kudos to director Dick Lowry for investing this with a tense, solid urgency it doesn’t really deserve. Lowry may have been working with a D.O.A. teleplay, but he dealt with it .