When a troubled young mother leaves her baby on the steps of Good Parents John and Lily Malone (Keith Carradine and Farrah Fawcett), do you think they'll take the child into their home? If you don't know the answer to that one you haven't been watching many Movies of the Week, and TNT's Baby is no exception to the baby-in-a-basket formula. So try to keep up.

Set on a bleak and remote island somewhere in the northeast, Baby's setting serves as an apt stand-in for its characters and its theme. Lily Malone is haunted by the recent death of her infant son and shuns the world around her. The 12-year old Larkin (Alison Pill) sees the basket baby as a shoddy replacement for her dead brother, hiding the letters the absent mother sends, letting the family know she's still alive and coming back. Grandma Byrd (Jean Stapleton) is old and dying. The power goes out a lot. And John does a fair bit of tap dancing. In other words, it's all very depressing.

Ultimately, Baby probably has a lot more to say than can be crammed into 90 minutes, and what's left on screen has been done before, time and time again. It's an admirable effort and scrubbing the Hallmarkitis out of the subject matter, but the haphazard, meandering -- and ultimately, surprisingly hollow -- tale won't have you running back for the "encore" presentations.



Walking babies.