TV REVIEW : ‘Getting Up and Going Home’ a Realistic Divorce Drama

“That loving politeness--that’s what we’ve got,” the wife bitterly complains to her husband by way of underscoring her need to let go of their 26-year marriage in the credible divorce drama “Getting Up and Going Home” (tonight on Lifetime cable at 9).

The above couple (Blythe Danner and Tom Skerritt) are successful, upscale people who deeply love each other but their marriage has run down like a rusty clock. The wife sees it. The husband’s into denial, despite consecutive affairs with two other women, one a glitzy homemaker (Roma Downey) who likes the idea of a lover on the side and the other an independent, single mother (Julianne Phillips) who compels the estranged husband to stop floundering and face himself.

None of this is told in a downbeat way. Upbeat melancholia best describes it. As far as love wars go, this is comparatively realistic stuff because of the intelligent dialogue and the high identity quotient inherent in the material (from a script by Peter Nelson, who adapted from the excellent novel by Robert Anderson).

The production starts out wobbly and a little flat but quickly enough Skerritt nicely establishes an amiable, low-key character who is a kind of middle-aged Everyman--in this case, a whiz-bang lawyer grappling with professional torpor, the fear of personal change and being alone and awkwardly starting life anew in the singles world.

What springs him back to life is a guest summer law professorship at his alma mater, where he meets a divorced young mom who’s his teammate in a faculty-student softball game (Phillips, delectable in tattered cutoffs and a catcher’s mitt). They indulge a summer romance but she’s fiercely on guard and wary of pushy men who don’t know what they want.

Ultimately, after he returns home to a touching surprise birthday party thrown by the wife who’s leaving him (the calm, sensible Danner), the husband finds the light to begin life over again.

This story has the feel of a novel, and in director Steven Schachter’s hands none of it is mawkish (notwithstanding the birth of a grandchild) or overheated.

A warm personal touch is the husband’s beloved, ailing 15-year-old golden retriever, which he takes everywhere and which serves, if you wish, as an unstressed metaphor for the fading light and burial of a once golden marriage.