Picks and Pans Review: For Love and Glory

CBS (Sat., Sept. 11, 9 p.m. ET)

C

Let’s play Guess That Epoch. Here’s your clue: “Sass me, will you, you high-and-mighty planter’s bastard?” You got it. We’re back in the Old South, the TV home of bad accents and melodrama as sticky as interstate rest-stop pecan pie.

Our hosts are the Doyles, an aristocratic family in the Virginia Piedmont. In this trite TV movie, father (Robert Foxworth) finds solace from his shrewish wife (Kate Mulgrew) in the slave quarters. The roguish elder son (Daniel Markel) marries the hotheaded daughter (Tracy Griffith) of a drunken Irish peddler. It falls to the younger son (Zack Galligan) to uphold the family honor. Then, heigh-ho, it’s off to the Civil War, for some remarkably small-scale battles. At the same time, back on the home front, the womenfolk get all catty while enduring hardships.

Olivia D’Abo, Victor Love and Tom O’Brien costar in this fatuous bit of Dixie-fried folderol. It all ends rather abruptly, raising the scary prospect that the network envisions this piffle as a possible series.