TV Reviews : A Poignant Drama of Babies ‘Switched at Birth’

NBC’s two-part “Switched at Birth” is not merely sad. It’s a blustery typhoon of sorrows that at times blows you over with its misery.

Based on an incredible true case, this is the largely feel-bad story of the aftermath of two infant girls being mysteriously mixed up shortly after birth, the hospital giving each to the other’s family.

Airing at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on Channels 4, 36 and 39, it plays almost like two separate movies, the first almost unbearably morose and calculating, the second a highly interesting legal study interwoven with poignancy.

The scene of the switch is a hospital in a small Florida town where, in 1978, new parents Bob and Judith Mays (Brian Kerwin and Judith Hoag) and Ernest and Regina Twigg (John Jackson and Bonnie Bedelia) mistakenly leave the hospital with each other’s daughters, one a sickly infant facing serious problems. With tragedy in both of their futures, the families go their separate ways. The error goes undiscovered for a decade.

That is the essence of Part 1. It’s is a manipulative monolith of tears and heartbreak, with executive producer/writer Michael O’Hara and director Waris Hussein operating their vast control panel of emotional buttons without restraint.

A grieving widower flips through pictures of his dead wife. A dead child’s beloved stuffed toy is bequeathed to a playmate. A eulogy is given at the child’s funeral. One after the other, these are just some of tricks of the tear-jerker’s trade employed here, and you sense that the filmmakers are gleefully massaging your tear ducts instead of letting the story’s emotion evolve honestly and without false stimulation.

But hang in there. The storytellers pull themselves together for compelling Part 2, as both families and their lawyers (played by Caroline McWilliams and Ed Asner) engage in grueling legal combat over the surviving child, a no-win war underpinned by moral questions that go to the heart of parenthood. Although the Twiggs have a spate of other children while Mays has only the girl he believes to be his genetic child, the story takes no sides in this tug of war. By portraying both sides as caring and well-intentioned, it has you questioning what you would do if you were each of these wounded parents.

Rescuing the production also are very strong performances by Kerwin and Bedelia, with fine support by Jackson and Ariana Richards as Kimberly Mays. Yet they, too, are victimized by Part 1 and by Part 2’s terribly hokey ending that belies the still-unresolved nature of this bizarre and woeful case.