TV REVIEW : An AIDS Resource for Teens

“In the Shadow of Love: A Teen AIDS Story,” airing on PBS tonight (at 8 on Channels 28, 15 and 24) and on ABC Thursday (at 3 p.m. on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), is a first-class survival resource for adolescents.

It’s hardly the first time that the subject of AIDS and teens has been seen on television. In “Degrassi High’s” season opener last April, for example, the school bully tested HIV positive; “Between Friends,” a recent educational drama on KCET, focused on choices adolescents can make to protect themselves.

But repetition of this theme is vital, and this involving drama, written by Gordon Rayfield and directed by Consuelo Gonzalez, provides frank talk and solid information.

The story centers on Katie (Jennifer Dundas), the ambitious anchor for her high school’s news team. She’s persuaded by camera person Lisa (Lisa Vidal), whose brother has AIDS, to do a report about teens who are HIV positive, or who have the disease.

Katie talks to teens in an AIDS support group, squeamish about it until she realizes they’re not much different than she is. Along with Katie, viewers learn how AIDS is contracted, about homophobic and racial prejudices that color societal perceptions of the disease, and about protection from it. Tony Award-winning Harvey Fierstein (“Torch Song Trilogy”) makes an appearance as an AIDS counselor underscoring high-risk behaviors.

Abstinence is noted as providing 100% protection; condom use is discussed, with humorous suggestions on how to get a boy to use one and the need for girls to know they have the right to ask.

It takes Katie awhile to see that she is in a high-risk group, too: She has unprotected sex with her boyfriend. He had told her he was a virgin; he wouldn’t lie, would he?

The ending is predictable, but effective; it deals summarily with the kind of denial that says, “It can’t happen to me.”