TV REVIEWS : ‘Darkness’: Drug Abuse Tale Retold

Anyone who’s experienced Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or a drug-rehab program, or who’s shared a life with the addicted, will easily identify with “Darkness Before Dawn” (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39).

Others may feel they’ve seen this story too many times to watch it once again. Yet, if done honestly, some stories can never be told enough. “Darkness Before Dawn,” although your characteristic “based-on-a-true-story”-social problem TV movie, treads the path of such strong drug-abuse movies as “Panic in Needle Park” and “The Days of Wine and Roses.”

Meredith Baxter, playing another self-destructive mother after back-to-back Betty Broderick movies, portrays a nurse and single parent who falls for one of her drug patients (the glib, charming Stephen Lang) in a Nevada clinic.

While he’s a certified junkie who makes a stab at staying clean, it’s not long before he’s ruined their marriage. The most jarring scene, under John Patterson’s uncompromising direction, centers on the throes of withdrawal amid domestic terror.

But even the husband doesn’t know that his wife also is hooked. Into denial and having access to drugs through her job, she’s a woman secretly dependent on pharmaceuticals and alcohol. Through childhood flashbacks, writer Karen Hall dramatizes a reason for the wife’s habit: a father who systematically destroyed her self-confidence.

The movie dramatizes the concept of “tough love” when the husband, now recovered, kicks his drunken wife out of the house. Scenarist Hall tunes into the language of AA as Baxter’s wife turns to her husband and thanks him “for having the guts to stop trying to save me so I could save myself.”