TV Reviews : NBC’s ‘Living a Lie’ Has the Ring of Truth

NBC’s “Living a Lie”(at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39) compellingly dovetails a wife’s marital dilemma with community bigotry against Mexican-Americans in a small Southwestern town.

Compared to stories about victimized blacks, white prejudice against Latinos is a subject seldom dramatized in movies or on TV. By focusing her plot in a remote, sun-baked environment (the show was shot in Prescott, Ariz.), writer Dalene Young isolates and heightens the daily poisons that separate white and brown faces everywhere, from the local barroom to church services to the beauty shop.

Starring as the heroine--initially seen as a knee-jerk wife and lover (her marriage to rancher Peter Coyote bristles with sexual dynamics)--Jill Eikenberry negotiates a solid segue from “L.A. Law,” illuminating under Larry Shaw’s direction a women driven to fight the mistrust, deception and venality around her.

The opening moments signal the tragedy to follow when Coyote’s affable working stiff of a father gets high in a saloon with his epithet-spewing brother and shoots up a jukebox because it’s blaring mariachi music.

The good old boys, now thoroughly smashed, jump in a van and rumble into the desert, where they run out of gas outside a Mexican-American parish. The racially spiteful younger brother (a convincingly arrogant David Andrews) torches the building, unknowingly engulfing in flames a teen-age Mexican boy and girl.

The stage is thus set for the hell-raisers’ cover-up pact of silence and the entitled living lie that wrecks havoc on the Coyote-Eikenberry marriage and the couple’s two children (with juvenile Jarred Blancard vividly capturing a boy’s racist conditioning).

The bigotry is so extreme that the racism may seem stacked and unreal to many viewers accustomed to more sophistication and subtlety in their urban relations. But the story rings true; the topicality is unnerving.