Murder in New Hampshire

Stars: Helen Hunt (TV's "Mad About You," The Waterdance, Only You), Chad Allen, Howard Hesseman (TV's "WKRP in Cincinnati"), Ken Howard (TV's "The White Shadow"), Michael Lerned (TV's "The Waltons"). On television just months after the sensational court case ended, this Turner Home Entertainment TV-movie stars Helen Hunt as Pamela Smart, a newly married twentysomething media director for a high school who initiates an affair with one of her students, 15-year-old Billy Flynn (Chad Allen). Pamela convinces Billy that only by murdering Pamela's husband Greg, a life insurance salesman, can the couple find true happiness and freedom. If the film ever intended to offer compelling psychological insights into the character of Pamela Smart, it missed the mark. The film opens in media res with the murder, and then rotely retraces the steps leading up to the murder, and briefly touches on the court case which followed it. While Hunt and Allen both do a fine job of playing their roles, the film just jumps from one "sensational" event to the next in the unraveling of the story. That's not to say the film is unwatchable, anymore than the weekly tabloids at the grocery checkout stand are unreadable. We're a nation of gawkers, so we'll look. But Murder in New Hampshire won't tell us anything that we don't already know. Audience: True crime buffs.