TV REVIEWS : ‘Lies and Lullabies’: Stinging Statement on Pregnant Addicts

Susan Dey discards her chic TV image with a vengeance to play a drug-addicted mother whose baby is taken from her by the courts in the honestly rendered “Lies and Lullabies” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

While the movie makes a stinging statement about pregnant women who abuse drugs, this is not a message picture so much as an absorbing character study of an ordinary young woman, loving in most respects, who can’t turn down a line of powder even if it means the baby she’s carrying might be born drug-infected.

Guess what? She loses the infant to social service agencies and begins a grueling, lonely fight to clean up her act in order to gain custody of her child from a wretched foster home that looks like something out of a novel by Charles Dickens.

This story could easily have turned into a wail of tears and misery except for the measured direction by Rod Hardy (an Australian making his American debut) and a sure-footed script (by Janet Heaney, Matthew Eisen and Joe Landon).

Dey, who co-produced, doesn’t settle for a one-dimensional, merely disreputable character. While weak as hell, her single-parent figure is a tender, devoted mother cursed with a genetic addiction inherited from her mom (Piper Laurie). Dey’s slightly glazed demeanor and shag hairstyle help to earmark a distinct character galaxies removed from her uptown presence in “L.A. Law” and “Love & War.”