TV REVIEW : ‘Stormy’ a Low-Pressure Mystery

A press release describes the plot of “Stormy Weathers,” a vehicle for Cybill Shepherd to return to the private-eye business, as being “in the hard-boiled tradition of film noir.” Actually, this TV movie (which at 9 tonight on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) is about as hard-boiled as a marked-down chocolate Easter egg left out in the May sun.

Even as a lighthearted parody of the detective tradition, it’s no “Moonlighting.” . . . Heck, it’s no “Fish Police.”

At least the variably charming Shepherd had a character to play--and a foil to play off of--on her former hit series. Here, apparently slumming for a pilot as unlikely private dick “Sam” Weathers, she once again cracks wise, but now is also a master of martial arts, among other talents that keep her on top of what little action there is.

When not commiserating with her best friend (Diane Salinger as “Bogey,” a lesbian L.A. Times reporter!), she’s drooling after the hunky Euro-trash client (Robert Beltran) who’s hired her to track down his long-lost brother.

It’s not so much that the convoluted mystery plot is impossible to follow as that you won’t want to bother. Most of the script is talky exposition about unseen characters who died (or did they?) 15 years ago in some sort of revolutionary drug-smuggling operation. The chief murder suspect is an ex-leftist congresswoman (Mimi Kuzyk)--who we know can’t be the culprit simply because she’s described as “pro-choice,” Shepherd’s favorite off-screen cause.

Occasionally the plot mechanics--which are right off the dull-o-meter--are broken up by a terribly campy, Chandler-esque voice-over narration. (“I figured their combined IQs as somewhere below my bust size,” opines Shepherd of two thugs she’s about to karate-chop, in what passes for the script’s best line, “but they weren’t there to launch the space shuttle.”) It’s far more glib than anything this dumb has an honest right to be.

Glenn Gordon Caron, phone home.