TV REVIEWS : For Cybill Shepherd, ‘Telling Secrets’ of a Femme Fatale

“Telling Secrets,” featuring Ken Olin as a dogged detective and Cybill Shepherd as a coolly venomous femme fatale , fails to justify its two-night length and squanders its suspense with a dizzying array of subplots (at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

“Although fictionalized, the drama is based on a true story,” reports an opening credit roll in what is almost de rigueur in network movieland. No matter. Even if all these events were true, the movie fails to distill the messy plot strands into something propulsive. A flatness permeates the production.

The script by Jennifer Miller, which opens with a brutal murder of a young mother in her bedroom, is self-defeating because it’s so overplotted with callow, uninteresting male hangers-on in the life of the rich, coldblooded Shepherd. Not only that, but the trio of charmed lovers who shuffle in and out of her gleaming home, including a husband (Chris McDonald) she conspires to kill, tend to look and act alike. The effect dulls your imagination.

Basically, “Telling Secrets” frames Shepherd as a watchable blonde who looks great in sun glasses. It’s a sharp contrast and notable fall from her last TV movie, TNT’s smashing ’92 kidnap caper “Memphis,” which she coproduced, co-wrote and in which she was terrific as a Southern gang moll with a heart.

Olin is fine as the story’s relentless cop who’s initially hoodwinked by Shepherd until he wiretaps her disaffected sister (the blowzy but refreshing Mary Kay Place) in a nervous diner scene that concludes Part 1.

Framed in flashback, the story, directed by Marvin Chomsky, resumes in Part 2 as a cross-continental hide-and-seek caper. Dismayingly, the payoff--the woman’s ultimate capture--is not even dramatized. Although we pick her up in a Spanish prison (where the real-life villainess reportedly remains to this day), the result is anticlimactic. In a sense, the whole movie is anticlimactic.