Brothers alone, without sugar coating

“Miracle’s Boys,” the well-done miniseries that starts at 8 tonight on the N (Noggin’s nighttime network for adolescents), is everything a parent could ask for in children’s TV. It’s based on a thoughtful, award-winning novel for young adult readers. The great Spike Lee directed its first and last installments. The plot revolves around family values. It’s wholesome enough to be marketed as a Black History Month feature.

In other words, lie to your kids. Tell them this show is about bling-bling thug life or is an inner-city “Party of Five” or some such. Because no self-respecting adolescent is going to tune in to something with as much earnest, high-minded buzz as has been attached to this feature, and they should. “Miracle’s Boys” isn’t flashy, and the writing is pedestrian in a few places, but unlike most TV aimed at young people, it has a ring of emotional truth, which it earns by resisting the grown-up urge to soft-pedal and sentimentalize.

Ty’ree, Charlie and Lafayette Bailey are half-black, half-Puerto Rican orphans in Harlem whose father is long dead and whose mother, Milagro, recently died. Desperate to keep his siblings out of foster care, 20-year-old Ty’ree (Pooch Hall) has dropped out of MIT after winning a scholarship there to study engineering. As the story opens, he and the 14-year-old baby of the family, Lafayette (Julito McCullum) are in their dingy apartment, awaiting the return of brother Charlie, 16, (Sean Nelson) who, having robbed a bodega shortly before Milagro’s death, has spent a year in juvenile hall.

Charlie’s incarceration is treated not as the usual glib back story but as the trauma such matters tend to be in life. He returns to the apartment a changed child, distant and mean. The neighborhood -- populated by a mix of people, the majority not gangbangers -- welcomes him, but he rejects those who want to pretend nothing has happened and those who fawn over his newfound “street cred.”

When he wordlessly turns away from the homecoming party his brothers have scraped to put on for him, the ugliness of the rejection is unlike the frown-faced stuff that tends to get passed off as rage on, say, the Disney Channel. When a starry-eyed school friend asks what it was like to be incarcerated, Charlie looks away in disgust. “It’s like you was nobody,” he accurately mutters. Nelson’s quiet portrayal of a damaged kid is heartbreaking and chilling as he turns from the hero worship of his baby brother and the exhortations of his rule-bound older brother and begins spending more time with the neighborhood thugs.

The series, which runs as two half-hour episodes per night today, Saturday and Sunday, is a milestone for the N, which is Nickelodeon’s sister network and which, in its third year, has built a franchise around the wildly popular “DeGrassi: The Next Generation” and other shows that appeal to young teens. “Miracle’s Boys” is the N’s first dramatic miniseries and a show about boys on a network whose audience has skewed female. It’s also one of the few TV productions anywhere to feature a cast that is almost entirely nonwhite.

LeVar Burton, who directs one of the six episodes and who for 20 years has been the host and executive producer of “Reading Rainbow,” has said he tried five years ago to bring Jacqueline Woodson’s novel to TV. He had no takers, largely because it was pigeonholed as a black story, rather than a universal tale of adolescence and grief.

What’s most memorable about the series, though, are its flickers of realism, which underscore the demoralizing phoniness of most of the rest of TV for kids. “Miracle’s Boys” was shot in Harlem, and the producers consulted local school kids to maintain the script’s authenticity. The characters look like real adolescents, not ex-Mouseketeers in their early 20s.

Ty’ree scarfs down his food the way young guys do; Lafayette’s cheeks have little constellations of blemishes on them. Their apartment has the lonely aura homes always get when profound loss comes to visit. A flashback to their mother shrieking when Charlie is arrested conveys not just the pain but the scariness of hysterical grown-ups. The plot is hopeful and upbeat -- this is, after all, a kids’ drama -- but it avoids group hugs and “learning” moments.

The result is bracing and welcome in this propagandized era. To kids who don’t know how worthy it is, this G-rated production will feel like PG-13.

*

‘Miracle’s Boys’

Where: The N

When: 8-9 tonight, also Saturday, Sunday. Repeats at 10 each night

Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Pooch Hall...Ty’ree

Sean Nelson...Charlie

Julito McCullum...Lafayette

Executive producers Nikki Silver, Orly Wiseman, David C. McCourt. Directors Spike Lee, Bill Duke, LeVar Burton, Ernest Dickerson, Neema Barnette.