TELEVISION REVIEW

Chandra Wilson, starring in the Hallmark Channel drama, wrings true emotion from a script's sanitized reality.

By MARY McNAMARA, Television Critic

Chandra Wilson is the reason to watch "Accidental Friendship," a Hallmark Channel weepie about a homeless woman who finds her way with the help of a mystifyingly benevolent and stunningly beautiful police officer. Wilson is, of course, best known for her role as Dr. Miranda Bailey on ABC's mega-hit "Grey's Anatomy." There she has proved time and again that there is pretty much nothing she can't pull off, including giving a righteous and exhausted voice to ambitious working mothers and coining an almost unforgivably cute term for female genitalia.

"Accidental Friendship" does nothing to diminish her reputation. It will not catapult her to leading-role stardom, but that's due more to Anna Sandor's by-the-numbers script than Wilson's abilities.

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Sandor, who wrote the two very fine American Girl teleplays ("Felicity: An American Girl Adventure" and "Molly: An American Girl on the Home Front"), seems to have committed the most deadly of writerly sins: She's fallen so deeply in love with her characters that she can barely bring herself to inflict on them the problems from which the narrative, and the tension, arises. Instead, she creates the most sanitized version of street living since Oscar's garbage can on "Sesame Street."

Yes, Yvonne is homeless, but she has managed to find a fairly nice abandoned house to live in with two adorable dogs. Yes, alcoholism seems to have played a role in her plight, but we see her drunk just once and then in a gentle, croony way that suggests one too many Hennessy nightcaps rather than fortified wine in a bag.

Likewise, officer Tami Baumann (Kathleen Munroe) is never too busy as an officer of the law to help deliver a puppy or yet another lecture about the beauty of rehab. As in any Hallmark love story worth its salt, Tami has been Disappointed in Love and so has developed that brittle shell we like so much in our chick-lit heroines, a shell that almost, but of course not quite, defeats the handsome and noble officer Kevin Brawner (Gabriel Hogan).

Really, in watching the gentle crime-scene flirtation between these two, you begin to doubt the existence of shows like "CSI," much less "The Shield."

There are lost dogs, there are estranged grandchildren, there is cancer, yet somehow Wilson manages to find dignity and genuine emotion in each and every scene. Several times she is greatly aided by Ben Vereen, who plays Wes, a fellow homeless person with the bearing of a college professor and the hypnotic grace of, well, Ben Vereen.

"Accidental Friendship" is, among other things, an attempt to remind us how frail is the line between "normal life" and the streets. Tami, in fact, has a rather unfortunate third-act speech in which she says just this. But when you have performers as fine as Wilson and Vereen, you don't have to hit anyone over the head with a grocery cart or drown them in syrup. You can make your homeless woman drunk and dirty and truly disorderly and, if she's played by Chandra Wilson, we'll love her all the more for being real.

mary.mcnamara@latimes .com