TV REVIEWS : When Murder Is Along ‘Bloodlines’

“Bloodlines: Murder in the Family” gives Elliott Gould a wonderfully gross, sniveling role: a callow, greedy Jewish businessman who commits patricide and matricide on Yom Kippur.

The four-hour miniseries (tonight and Tuesday at 9 p.m. on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) is based on the 1985 double-slaying of Gerald and Vera Woodman, a prominent Brentwood couple cut down by contract killers in their carport. The couple’s two adult sons were indicted for the murder, and one of them, Stewart Woodman (Gould), testified against his brother Neil (John Pleshette) to avoid the death penalty.

It’s a venal story of family hatred and shattering of the American dream--as naturally hitched to a TV movie as the certain-to-be-produced drama of Lyle and Erik Menendez (the brothers awaiting trial on charges that they murdered their parents in affluent circumstances that strikingly echo the Woodman case).

The movie’s entitled bloodlines pit son against father (Sam Wanamaker) in a classic confrontation that is clearly seen rooted in family greed, gambling and the humiliation that only a son can feel from a father.

The production, directed by Paul Wendkos, is much more than a story of murder and the familial blood knot. It’s equally about the murder suspect’s pampered wife (Mimi Rogers). Suddenly she loses her fancy Woodland Hills house, her jewels and the nanny and must make a new life for her three children.

Gould, looking a lot like his desperate, forlorn character in “Bugsy,” is quite convincing as the amoral, materialistic businessman gunning to take over his dad’s plastic firm while teaching his youngest son how to play poker as his eldest son goes to the track with his buddies after school. “Like father, like son” has seldom better applied to a story than here.

Still, the story’s overlapping strands--the husband’s murder rap and his wife’s ordeal--could have more forcefully been told in one evening.