TV Reviews : Burke, McRaney Team Up in ‘Love and Curses’

Real-life hubby-and-wife team Delta Burke and Gerald McRaney have crafted a valentine to themselves with “Love and Curses . . . and All That Jazz” (at 9 tonight on Channels 2 and 8), a TV movie that mixes a voodoo mystery yarn with the cutesy marital interplay of its leads. Both are listed as executive producers, and McRaney directed.

It’s not half as bad as it sounds: What they’re going for is a modern-day “Thin Man”--Nick and Nora Charles with Southern accents and no dog. At times, they come within spittin’ distance of their goal, much closer than you would’ve guessed. The story is pure hooey, and the rounds of affectionate bickering that accompany the unraveling of the case get old at times. But Burke and McRaney have a definite charm when they’re spitting out their most cantankerously pithy lines rapid-fire.

The blend of the horrific and the comedic is a little disconcerting at first. An opening sequence with a traumatized, hallucinating young woman running wild through the woods--and subsequently being declared dead on the operating table--is followed by our introduction to physician McRaney and shrink/spouse Burke, who are all quips, even when the gal in question shows up weeks later merely comatose instead of deceased. It’s zombie time in New Orleans.

Burke is far from being as endearing as a Mary Astor, say, but she does affect a perfect Southern upper-crust ‘tude quite capably. “Prostitution, blackmail, murder,” she muses at one point. “It’s all so . . . tacky .” So is “Love and Curses,” of course, but so knowingly so that it manages to stay watchably tacked-together for the duration.