TV Reviews : Values Gone Awry at Heart of ‘Pamela Smart’

On occasion, a motion picture-for-TV production company jumps on a true-life story with the alacrity of a news crew. It seems like only yesterday that a 23-year-old New Hampshire high-school teacher made headlines for manipulating her student lover into killing her husband.

Tonight, CBS’ “Murder in New Hampshire: The Pamela Smart Story” (at 9 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8) re-creates the seduction, lust and subsequent murder trial that resulted in a verdict six months ago to the day. Widow Smart, the media-dubbed “Ice Princess,” was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and sent to prison without possibility of parole.

Actress Helen Hunt turns the entitled figure into a sexually avaricious, material wife with a fetish for heavy metal, which is the show’s insistent musical motif and, on a subtle level, a signal of values, pop-and-otherwise, gone awry.

The person exposed in the New Hampshire trial and dramatized here is so unredeemable, so full of moral squalor, that the role is a risk-taking plum of a performance for Hunt. Under Joyce Chopra’s direction and a measured script by Joe Cacaci that doesn’t appear to take undue license, she is the image of willful arrogance

Smart meets her consort in love and crime, 16-year-old Billy Flynn (played with a subdued panic by Chad Allen), in a class at Winnacunnet High School. She unabashedly pursues the confused teen-ager. They blatantly make out in the back seats of cars with the youth’s student friends in the front seat, and, finally, she seduces him in her own house.

When the kid’s a total mess, she threatens to break off the affair unless he kills her husband--”so,” she entices the boy, “we can be alone.”

Smart’s obsession with her teen lover casts a wide destructive net. Swept into the whirlpool are Michael Learned and Ken Howard as the murdered victim’s parents, and two impressive young actors: Riff Regan as Smart’s loyal, restive student intern, and Kai Lennox as the bedevilled killer’s murder accomplice. (Flynn, who pulled the trigger, enlisted help from three thrill-seeking buddies; all confessed, testified against Smart and received 18- to 28-year prison terms.)