TV Reviews : ‘In a Child’s Name’: Who Gets the Baby?

A New Jersey baby--his mother dead and his father in the slammer for her murder--is the center of a fierce custody case waged by embattled relatives in “In a Child’s Name,” a four-hour CBS miniseries starting Sunday at 9 p.m. and concluding Tuesday at 9 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8.

Armchair family lawyers will have a field day keeping up with the legal machinations in this fact-based imbroglio in which the state of Indiana not only is ridiculed as a bastion of elderly ninnies who would steal a child for Christ but also is found morally guilty of state kidnaping.

The plot is really two stories: Sunday’s tale is absorbed by the disastrous honeymoon and subsequent murder of a young Italian-American wife (nicely played by Karla Tamburrelli), and the arrest and conviction of her dashing dentist husband (Michael Ontkean, in a devilish change of pace). The finale Tuesday is largely centered in courtrooms, where a war for custody of the victim’s baby is waged by fiercely determined and disparate combatants (hotheaded Valerie Bertinelli as the baby’s maternal aunt from New Jersey and the dour Louise Fletcher and David Huddleston as the infant’s paternal Indiana grandparents).

Director Tom McLoughlin and writers Bill Phillips and Charles Walker (who adapted the book “In a Child’s Name” by Peter Maas made a crucial decision to let our imaginations dramatize the violence. The husband’s brutality is seen only in its aftermath.