TV REVIEWS : CBS’ ‘Little Boy’ a Potent Drama

“There Was a Little Boy” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS, Channels 2 and 8) reconfirms the comparative freshness of the well-plotted, fictional network movie--a story, that is, of the imagination as opposed to the dramatization of news clippings.

The script by Wesley Bishop, based on the novel by Claire R. Jacobs, at first echoes the Lindbergh kidnaping case, then shifts to a surly teen-age protagonist who looks like a character out of S.E. Hinton’s popular teen novel “The Outsiders” and careens to a wildly improbable but potent, teary-eyed conclusion.

At the center of these emotional twists and turns are Cybill Shepherd and John Heard, portraying a successful couple expecting a new baby but awash in recrimination and guilt over the kidnaping of their first child 15 years earlier. The depiction of that infant kidnaping wrenchingly opens the movie and is a case study in suspenseful staging by director Mimi Leder.

The movie introduces a dynamic, young Canadian actor, Scott Bairstow, as a rebellious kid in Shepherd’s high school English class. His edginess and sense of recklessness suggests a young James Dean. In campus scenes that recall chunks of “Up the Down Staircase,” “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Splendor in the Grass,” Shepherd and Bairstow lurch toward a thermonuclear teacher-student explosion.

In their unending search for their long-lost child, Shepherd and Heard touch several genuine sparks. The resolution of their search (which won’t be given away here) is brushed with an emotional savagery that is almost operatic.

Contributing vital and flavorful supporting roles are Elaine Kagen as a haggard, mysterious, chain-smoking cleaning lady and Terri Ivens as a lustful, brazen, greedy co-ed.