And just what do these movies espouse?

“The Perfect Husband,” USA network’s trigger-happy exegesis of the Laci and Scott Peterson story, begins as so many true-crime, ripped-from-the-headlines, what-do-you-want-from-us-it’s-sweeps TV movies do, with a camera pointed at a nervous guy’s face.

This particular nervous guy is actor Dean Cain, playing the reportedly unfaithful spouse accused of murder, Scott Peterson. The camera belongs to “Good Morning America,” as impersonated here by USA, where Peterson famously wriggled like a harpooned sturgeon in response to a very simple question. Did he murder his wife?

Save for Scott Peterson, of course, nobody knows the answer -- not “Husband” screenwriter Dave Erickson, not Cain, not even the USA Network, dramatized wink-nudging and scary piano music notwithstanding. If things seemed as if they couldn’t get any worse for Peterson, they just did. Is there a registered voter left in San Mateo County who remains unswayed by the People magazine covers, etc., etc.? If so, that person should stay away from the USA network this Friday and report for jury duty first thing Monday.

“The Perfect Husband” is, obviously, “An Ironic Title” intended to make us feel cynical and knowing. TV movies love to postulate that appearances lie. In other words, you can always rely on a made-for-TV fictional drama about love and marriage to shore up your love-and-marriage-related fantasies, and depend on made-for-TV dramatizations based on true stories to dash them.

“It Must Be Love,” which airs Sunday on CBS, balances “The Perfect Husband” out nicely. “It Must Be Love” stars real-life married couple Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen as a husband and wife on the verge of divorce who come back together after surviving a period of toe-threatening adversity. The story by Nancy Whitmore was inspired by a newspaper article, but its connection to reality is tenuous. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley wrote the screenplay specifically for Danson and Steenburgen.

The story begins on George (Danson) and Clem (Steenburgen) Gazelle’s daughter’s wedding day. The presumably perfect couple get through the day, wait for their son to go back to college, and proceed with their plans for an amicable, do-it-yourself divorce.

Planning to negotiate their settlement amicably, they load up George’s camper and set out on a road trip to Maine.

It’s all very “Two for the Road” -- reminisce about the past 20 years, blame, cry, laugh, mess around -- until it takes an unexpected turn into “Alive!” territory. George swerves to avoid an elk and the camper gets stuck in the mud, then buried in snow.

When they don’t hear from their parents for days, the kids -- who have plenty of adorable, eminently fixable problems of their own -- organize a rescue mission.

Their odd-couple grandmothers -- the Connecticut patrician and the Georgia peach -- help, too. And you know what that means: shawls, cakes, a butler, hugs.

With “The Perfect Husband,” meanwhile, USA Network has given us a very loose interpretation of a police report. “The Perfect Husband” is not the story of Laci Peterson at all. It is the story of Scott Peterson’s media coverage brought to life.

Beginning after Laci’s disappearance and taking every news development as a plot point, the film is as insidious an indictment of Scott Peterson as we have seen so far. A dead ringer for his subject, Cain exudes a certain cold amphibian charm as he nervously circles his Modesto shark tank, in stark contrast to the real Laci Peterson, whose famous photo is used throughout the film.

The one concession the movie makes to the possibility of her husband’s innocence is its inclusion of a woman who claimed to have seen Laci after she went missing. The woman, an important witness for the defense, died earlier this week, in real life, as the trial was getting underway.

Defense attorney Mark Geragos can’t be too happy about this film. Viewers excited by the prospect of spending Valentine’s weekend absorbing the lessons of TV marriages, on the other hand, couldn’t ask for a better pair of bookends.

*

‘It Must Be Love’

Where: CBS

When: Sunday, 9-11 p.m.

Rating: The network has rated the movie TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under age 14).

Ted Danson...George Gazelle

Mary Steenburgen...Clem Gazelle

Erin Karpluk...Tess Gazelle

Adam Nicholas Frost...Joe Gazelle

Polly Holliday...Mama Bell

Bonnie Bartlett...Kate Gazelle

Executive producers, Wendy Hill-Tout, Michael Jaffe, Howard Braunstein and Keri Selig. Director, Steven Schachter. Writer, Beth Henley.