TV Reviews : ‘Burden of Proof’ Needs More Evidence

High-powered attorney Sandy Stern returns home one day to discover that his wife has committed suicide, leaving behind a puzzling medical bill and a mystifying $850,000 withdrawal from her private account. He also learns that his wealthy, brash, philandering brother-in-law, Dixon Hartnell, is being investigated by the feds.

What does it all add up to? An impenetrable mystery and a sizzling edge-of-your-seat suspense story?

No. ABC’s two-part “The Burden of Proof” is not that, even though it’s based on a bestseller by Scott Turow, whose first novel, “Presumed Innocent,” was an exquisitely tense and stressful whodunit that was made into a pretty fair theatrical movie.

Anyone expecting such electricity from Turow II--the book or the miniseries (at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42)--will be disappointed. They’ll have to settle instead for some occasional tingles, some watchable melodrama and some entertaining performances. Nothing to rev up over, but very nice.

While seeking to repair his life and solve the enigmas left behind by his wife, Stern (Hector Elizondo) teeters between guilt over her death and frustration over the unethical behavior of the abrasive Hartnell (Brian Dennehy), who is also his client. Meanwhile, women are throwing themselves at the stodgy, balding, mid-50ish widower. “I don’t have protection,” he says. “Bedside table, top drawer,” she says.

The romancing does occasionally get a little leaden. (Victoria Principal and Stefanie Powers play the women in Stern’s life, and Mel Harris, as a federal prosecutor, at times looks like a possibility.) Yet Mike Robe keeps John Gay’s script reasonably on track and, in something quite rare for this middlebrow genre, “The Burden of Proof” ends with series of scenes that carry a powerful emotional wallop. And Kansas City filming gives “The Burden of Proof” the look of, well, Kansas City.