TV Reviews : ‘Daddy’ an Alternative to the World Series

Another Danielle Steel heartbreaker airs tonight, continuing NBC’s counterprogramming strategy against sports.

The good news is that “Daddy” (at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39) is better than Steel’s “Palomino,” which aired Monday night. That’s not saying a lot, but the legions of Steel’s female fans should find it a viable romantic alternative to the World Series, against which “Daddy” competes in most parts of the country.

Steel likes to jump-start stories with sudden marital breakups. Again, but with stronger characters than in “Palomino,” one spouse rejects the other, and the bereft and embittered party goes through hell only to find redemption with a new and sexier lover.

What gives “Daddy” its nominal bite is that it is the wife (Kate Mulgrew) who dumps a suburban dream life (a wonderful husband and three children) to return to college after 18 years of marriage. College is 200 miles away.

The anguished husband (a convincing performance by Patrick Duffy) doesn’t know what hit him. The kids are torn up, too. The oldest, a hostile 18-year-old high school dropout (a solid turn by Ben Affleck) rejects his father to go live with a pregnant girlfriend.

Dad, a successful Chicago advertising executive, flees to Beverly Hills, resettles his children and relights passion’s flame with a shimmering brunette who’s one of his agency’s star models (Lynda Carter). Like a replay of the ex-wife, she has career plans, too, that beckon her away and scare the man to death. Steel is big on women whose deferred dreams cry for a payoff.

“Daddy” gets pretty gooey and trite at the end, and the characters live in such monied splendor that we should be so lucky to have their problems. But adapter L. Virginia Brown and director Michael Miller (who also helmed Monday’s “Palomino”) draw relevant blood in the Duffy-Mulgrew husband-and-wife battles.