TV Reviews : A Soapy but Credible ‘Runaway Father’

Mothers owed child support may wish to check out “Runaway Father” on CBS Sunday (9 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8). The movie stars Donna Mills as a real-life wife who tracked down and hauled her runaway husband into court in what a postscript cites as “a precedent-setting case for the rights of parents.”

The production is pretty soapy. The husband’s abandonment of his family after three years of marriage is abrupt and poorly motivated. Neither scenarist Stephanie Liss (adapting a book by Richard Rashke) nor director John Nicolella clarify this one-dimensional guy, whose problems are unexplored. Only the most objective female viewer will notice that the blank and baffling father (a square-jawed Jack Scalia) shortchanges the script’s dramatic scope.

Mills, though, credibly catches a young wife and mother’s vulnerability when the knight in her life flees the hearth. “I don’t know anything,” she cries. “I have no training.” That’s the show’s most important message. Propelled into welfare, she makes a gritty return to college and finds security in a job with the IRS.

But the story’s dramatic strength is the kids’ confrontation with their long-lost dad, who remains angry throughout the ordeal. These scenes have tension and a refreshing lack of sentimentality as the young girls, after a childhood of hurt and guilt, finally come face to face with their father--through a wire mesh window in a holding tank in a police station.