NEW YORK -- There are reasons to love and hate 'Warm Hearts, Cold Feet,' a cute two-hour CBS TV-movie that has the smell of a regular series.
First, let's dwell on hate.
The movie, airing Sunday (Jan. 18, 9-11 p.m. EST), features Margaret Colin and Tim Matheson as a thoroughly modern, totally attractive couple of lovebirds.
Each has a fabulous career, each respects the other in the morning, and together they try to make their marriage a true 50-50 partnership. Yech.
If this is not too cute already, the couple work at competing newspapers. She is a sports columnist who knows all too well what a men's locker rooms smells like. Football players ask her out on dates. She says cute things like, 'If you were a quarterback that pass would be incomplete.' On the other side of the marital bed, he is one of those columnists who writes cheery things about life.
Everything is hunky dory until husband writes a column about wife, saying they have decided to have a baby. That wouldn't be so bad if he had first informed his wife that she was about to have his baby. This is where the conflict comes in.
Anyway, they have cute arguments until she gives in. Yes, she'll have his baby. Husband dutifully notifies the readership by updating his column with all the pertinent facts.
Along the way, she decides to write a column of her own in retaliation.
So now the cute couple try to have a cute kid, but this is the one thing they are not successful at. Since their private lives have become public, everybody on the street feels free to offer advice. One woman suggests they have sex every day until they drop, but after a week they are too pooped to bop. Next, a man suggests they abstain for a month and then go at it. That doesn't work either.
Finally they see a doctor, who has more scientific ways. Still no go.
Is adoption an option? Perhaps, but they can't locate a child.
Along the way there's a quickie in the elevator and more columns in the newspaper until finally the husband orders an anchovie and mustard sandwich. They know something is cooking.
Now, she is with child.
The whole things seems a direct theft from the pilot of the ABC series 'Jack and Mike,' about two fabulously successful yuppies who can't find time to have sex because their careers keep them so busy. She was a columnist who wrote about their malady in the newspaper. He was a restaurant owner.
Despite the fact that some of the stuff makes the stomach turn, 'Warm Hearts, Cold Feet' is quirkily appealing. Colin, a former soap star who did wonders as the prosecutor in CBS's 'Foley's Square' until it was canceled, is equally sharp in this role. Same goes for Matheson.
As ridiculously perfect as their relationship is, the two actors still make it work. Something about the show seemed real. It brushed against such 'today' topics as the role of the working mother, the father and child care, and prejudice in the workplace against pregnancy.
But the best thing is Colin and Matheson are so fun-loving and frisky.
Somehow, someway, all this sugar does not sour the show. In the end, it is not altogether unpleasant.
