Jonathan Storm | Lifetime explores teen life with HIV

Listen up, kids. A long, long time ago, ABC and CBS had daytime movies aimed at kids and teens. They were called

Afterschool Specials

and they imparted important lessons about everything from drunk driving, to teen fatherhood, to bullies and suicide.

In those same days, all three networks (can you believe there were only three, totally?) also ran their own movies, in prime time, sometimes three times a week. That was a lot of movies, so everybody jumped for joy when somebody came up with an idea that would provide plenty of fodder.

The "disease of the week" genre was born, and, kids, people suffered, sometimes histrionically, sometimes surprisingly affectingly, from illnesses both well-known and obscure: Alzheimer's, bulimia, cancer, down through every letter of the alphabet.

Now-famous big shots like Ben Affleck, Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe and Felicity Huffman appeared in the school movies, and though most made-for-TV nighttime movies featured TV people, Charlton Heston, Alec Baldwin, William Holden, Val Kilmer, and other movie stars took turns, too. Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis starred together in one called Too Young to Die?.

It was produced in 1990 by Frank von Zerneck, a legend in TV-movie circles, who has made more than 125 of them since 1975.

And that brings us to his latest, tonight's film at 9 on cable's proudly retro Lifetime network. Girl, Positive combines two art forms: school special and disease-of-the-week. It's about a high schooler who tests positive for HIV.

Nobody will mistake it for The Sopranos, but, like many "made-fors," it combines a little entertainment with its message. And it trumps the reality competition. ABC's Ex-wives Club and NBC's Age of Love should leave people begging for more disease movies.

Terri Hatcher's daughter on Desperate Housewives, Andrea Bowen, 17, is the girl, and Jennie Garth is a sympathetic teacher. Garth was a year older than her costar when she started out on Beverly Hills 90210. She's 35 now, and doesn't time fly when you're having fun?

S. Epatha Merkerson leaves the Law & Order squad room to run the HIV/AIDS support center downtown. She is a fountain of information.

Some things have changed since long ago. Now, the smart, hot girl is also a star soccer player. One of the boys engages in the age-old practice of carrying a condom in his wallet, just in case, but unlike teenagers of yore, or at least those I used to know, he replaces it regularly to make sure it's fresh.

Our heroine is punctilious about her sexual behavior. Not only is she on the pill, she won't let her boyfriend near without proper equipment. "No glove, no love," she chirps when he gets frisky in the sports equipment room. Alas, she wasn't always so persnickety.

There's a lot more matter-of-factness on cable in 2007 than there was on broadcast TV in 1987, but the movie, telecast two days before National AIDS Testing Day, has an important message: Kids do get AIDS, and they don't have to.

The abstinence movie's on another channel. This one acknowledges that teens have lots of sex. Fifty of them, the movie says, get infected with HIV every day in America. It advocates careful sex and HIV tests for the sexually active, and it could make a significant mother-daughter viewing experience.

I'm afraid guys just aren't going to watch Lifetime, which is too bad. They're much less likely to get HIV from heterosexual sex, but it does take two to tango, which is something people said even before TV movies.

Television

Girl, Positive

tonight at 9 on Lifetime.