TV Reviews : ‘I Love You’ Is a Potent Adoption Story

A strong adoption story can jar our sense of who we are and, on a broader level, shake up our preconception that blood is always thicker than water. Those potent themes are dramatized in a mesmerizing tale of a 16-year-old boy’s self-discovery in “Always Remember I Love You” (Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8).

Fewer things in life can be more shattering than discovering that your parents are not your real parents. Writer Vivienne Radkoff’s script has turned this trauma into a rigorous, unpredictable story that builds to a stunning conclusion in front of a family tree on Christmas morning. Keep a box of Kleenex handy. The fade-out on the tearful Patty Duke, who plays the alienated youth’s real mother, is a powerful and blissful moment.

This is a discerning, ambitious network movie that touches the same child-selling issues as the hit stage play “Baby Dance,” which touched a big nerve at the Pasadena Playhouse earlier this year. Director Michael Miller, despite the loaded gun of a crooked lawyer and a runaway adolescent seeking his genetic parents, never lets the production succumb to melodrama or cheap sentiment. That’s an accomplishment in a story like this.

Imaginative flashbacks, in a soft-focus motif, dramatize the theft of the adopted boy as he was plucked out of his front yard as a 2-year-old. Now the deception of his protective, well-meaning adopted parents, who thought they had bought the baby legally, has come home to roost.

The confused but likable teen-age protagonist is an affectionate rather than histrionic portrait by Stephen Dorff. In reality, his character is unbelievably self-contained and outwardly calm, but it’s a performance of such sweet ingenuity that you are swept up in it.

There are no villains here and no cliches. Airing the day before Christmas Eve, it’s really a Christmas carol, if you want to know the truth.