If you crave attention, if you want millions of people to know something about you, just get your life story made into a TV movie.
There are a few ways you can accomplish this. The least likely route you can take is to do something incredible. To overcome some great adversity. Or, even less likely, to make some great contribution to mankind.The most likely route you can take is to commit some heinous crime. Take a bunch of people hostage. Kill a bunch of people.
This is not a route I would suggest, but just take a look around network TV and you'll see how successful it is.
A third route is to lead a life that includes circumstances that are so bizarre that they could only play on TV as fact-based drama, because no one would believe it as fiction.
Such is the case in "Sin and Redemption" (8 p.m., Ch. 5), the kind of true story that's so outlandish someone thought to make it into a TV movie.
Cynthia Gibb stars as a bright, beautiful young girl from the wrong side of the tracks who's working as a waitress and headed for college. She's the pride and joy of her obnoxiously religious father (Ralph Waite of "The Waltons"), and her life seems headed in the right direction.
Until she's raped on the way home from work one night by a seemingly nice but drunken young man (Richard Grieco), whose face she never sees.
The poor young woman has even more trouble when she learns she's pregnant, and her father berates her for her wicked ways.
Into this despair steps a nice young man from a well-to-do family who wants to marry her and take care of her baby. What Gibb doesn't know is that this is the same young man who raped her.
The couple live relatively unhappily for several years - he's a drunk, by the way - and even have a couple more kids. But then the oldest girl needs a kidney transplant and, well . . . I won't give the rest of it away.
Almost as odd as the circumstances behind "Sin and Redemption" is the movie itself. For a set of circumstances as extreme as these, this movie is dull.
And, apparently, there wasn't enough script to fill out the movie so it resorts to extended music-video sequences from time to time.
Gibb, who was so great as Gypsy Rose Lee in "Gypsy," is trapped in a bad movie here. Even former teen-idol Grieco has demonstrated he has some talent in some of his other projects, but not in this one.
Just because a story is bizarre and true doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a good TV movie.