Tear-filled 'Candles' is a mushy mess

CBS's "Candles on Bay Street," a new Hallmark Hall of Fame production, is after you. It wants your tears. In one scene, the single mother played by Alicia Silverstone is holding her grieving boy tightly. When she looks at him, she smiles bravely; when she looks away, her face succumbs to a teary grimace. She repeats the same strong-to-weak action again. And again. And again. And finally, the moment isn't touching anymore; it's downright aggressive. Silverstone has shifted out of acting and into emotional smackdown.

"Candles on Bay Street," which premieres tomorrow at 9 p.m. on Channel 4, is all second-rate manipulation. It lacks the dignity and restraint that can inspire more genuine tears from viewers. This is the kind of movie that has salt-of-the-earth townsfolk singing "You've Got a Friend" to a dying woman not just once but twice, and the second time is when they've paraded to her house en masse to have a picnic in her yard. You see, the dying woman has shown everyone in a 5-mile radius how to live, how to love, and how to make syrup. It takes a village to drown us in treacle.

Don't read further if you don't want to know anything more specific about "Candles," which is based on a novel by K.C. McKinnon . Then again, it doesn't take long -- perhaps 15 minutes -- to see exactly where the story is heading. Sam (Eion Bailey) and Lydia (Annabeth Gish ) are married veterinarians in a quaint Maine town who are at a crossroads. She wants kids, he's not sure, and he repeatedly stares off into the cosmos to signify inner turmoil. When he hears that his childhood crush, Silverstone's Dee Dee, is back in town, he stares off into the cosmos with particular intensity.

But it turns out he's not going to cheat on Lydia with Dee Dee, who casually mentions that she'll be needing to make many visits to Boston "to pick up supplies." Yep, she is dying of lymphoma and needs to find a home for her 12-year-old son, Trooper (Matthew Knight). And so, um, well, you know. It goes there. And along the way, we see Polly Bergen wasted in the role of the brassy secretary, and we are exposed to a bland, extended candles metaphor in which candle maker Dee Dee says they "help us explain the darkness."

Also, "Candles" deploys cute puppies, white-face dying-person makeup just this side of Halloween, and a cloying soundtrack by Marvin Hamlisch whose every tinkling piano note heads toward your tear ducts on an attack mission. Silverstone has evolved into a comfortable screen actress, and one of these days she may have an adult breakthrough performance. But she's not worth watching in "Candles," which makes everything it touches drippy.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more TV news, visit www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog/.