TV REVIEWS : A Crime Package That Doesn’t Pay Off

Its made-for-cable movies are rarely anything to build an evening around. But women-targeted Lifetime--already deserving of thanks for extending the life of “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” after its cancellation by NBC--continues to plug away at original programming in prime time.

Not that original in this case necessarily signifies originality.

The cable network’s most ambitious effort to date, for example, is a two-hour slab of programs arriving at 9 tonight, consisting of a crime-reality series, an anthology and a private eye.

Is much of cable looking more and more like traditional television or what?

Well-known stabbing victim Theresa Saldana hosts and narrates “Confessions of Crime” at9 p.m., yet another gruesome series in which actual perpetrators and their victims are confusingly merged with dramatic re-creations.

The series unfolds from the female perspective, with tonight’s half hour centering on a woman who stabbed her husband to death after he relentlessly abused and battered her. Essentially telling her own story, she also appears on an actual police tape confessing to them about the 1987 slaying, which brought her a manslaughter conviction and two years in jail.

Although wife abuse is a serious problem and the legal basis for violent self-defense an ongoing debate, this “true story of love, obsession and, finally, bloodshed” from Chris Pye Entertainment retreads ground already trampled on by just about every TV tabloid and daytime talk show.

“The Hidden Room” at 9:30 p.m. is Lifetime’s new anthology about women, an interestingly mysterious half-hour series whose premiere, however, offers more mood than meat.

Alice Krige plays an emotionally fragile woman so devastated by the recent stillbirth of her child that she withdraws from her husband and is haunted by acutely realistic dream encounters with a young boy bearing the same name of an infant mistakenly brought to her in the hospital before she learned of her own baby’s death.

The performances are good, the characters intelligently drawn and director Gerard Ciccoritti has your attention while bringing a sense of foreboding to this exploration of a woman’s mind. But the story he has to work with never quite comes off, its payoff falling so short of the expectations it creates that your own sense of emptiness matches that of the troubled protagonist.

Much more intriguing is next week’s second episode, with Lara Flynn Boyle (“Twin Peaks”) especially good as a tormented college freshman whose thieving ways are somehow connected to her bent relationship with her possessive father.

A. H. Davis’ script, based on a short story by Mona Simpson, tiptoes perilously, with director Eleanore Lindo managing to keep this dark tale of eroticism and sexual perversion balanced on a dangerous high wire.

But the story ultimately falters by turning to pop psychology and an all-knowing FBI character for an unconvincing swift resolution.

Capping Lifetime’s first night of original programming is “Veronica Clare,” a stylishly mounted, Chandleresque-style series about a glamorous female private eye that begins somewhat promisingly tonight but just dies in next week’s second episode.

Beyond male biases among network programmers, there’s no reason at all for female detectives to be such a TV curiosity. Although no patsy, this one played by Laura Robinson, a striking blond whose face moves only occasionally, is a poached egg compared to the hard-boiled gumshoe of Sara Paretsky’s detective stories who Kathleen Turner plays on the big screen in the about-to-be-released “V. I. Warshawski.”

A partner in a jazz club, the utterly cool Veronica shows no interest in getting paid for her sleuthing. Tonight’s client is her eccentric Aunt Clara, who asks Veronica to intercede with a menacing gangster who insists that her late husband took him for $1 million.

Although the mobster acquiesces far too quickly, this hour written and directed by series creator Jeffery Bloom has subtlety and a charming playfulness that unfortunately is not sustained past tonight.

Next Tuesday’s episode--with Veronica having a fling with a cop who’s dishonest in a good cause--is not only comically pretentious and virtually plotless, but so incredibly campy that it could have come from the guys responsible for “Naked Gun 2 1/2”

Is it meant to be a parody? Alas, this is the only mystery here worth considering.