Night Sins

In 1997, she starred in another two-parter Night Sins (Feb 23 and 25, 1997), which would have gotten better ratings if not for being opposite "Frasier" and "Home Improvement" on opposite networks, but Valerie plugged her movie enough times when she was guesting on "Oprah", Rosie O'Donnell Show (Feb 19th, 1997), Politically Incorrect (Feb 20th/21st, 1997), and Late Late Show With Tom Snyder (Feb 21st/22nd, 1997).

When Valerie Bertinelli was offered a role in the CBS miniseries "Night Sins," she wanted to play an agent looking for a missing boy, not the boy's mom.

"I've played too many of those mothers and it does rip you apart," she says. Besides, the agent role has the possibility of growing into a regular gig.

If "Night Sins" did well in the ratings, producers say it would have become a series in the following year. Bertinelli and Harry Hamlin, who co-stars, would play Midwestern agents investigating all sorts of crimes. Think: "Silence of the Lambs" meets "Fargo."

The possibilities, Bertinelli says, are many. Still, "I've talked to Harry about an hour series and it's frightened me a bit because I've never done one before and I don't like to really work that hard."

If "Night Sins" became a series, which it didn't, Bertinelli realized she'll be locked in for an extended period of time.

"Night Sins," though, certainly has its share of thrills. Based loosely on the kidnapping of Minnesotan Jacob Wetterling, the book by Tami Hoag was designed to peel back the layers of small-town America.

"The book sort of represented the nature of good and evil,' Executive Producer Michele Brustin says. "You can leave the big city, but you really can't get away from the bad things."

Years after the Wetterling abduction, there was another, Hoag says, "and I just kept thinking how I would deal with situation, how terrible this would be if I were a cop working on a case where there are virtually no leads.

"For me, stories often begin with questions about a particular situation. I'll just keep asking questions and worrying on it and thinking about it until I need to deal with it in some way. Sometimes I get answers and sometimes I don't. But I need to explore them. That's how it began for me."

Once in print, the book was ready for others' interpretations. In the case of "Night Sins," a director took over and began to rework things.

In the miniseries, for example, Bertinelli is blond. In the book, her character has dark hair.

According to Hoag, that's OK. When she talked to agents with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, they indicated no women were in the field.

Gender bias "was not something I'd gone in there looking to deal with but, suddenly, it was right in my face." Hoag's field agent was a woman "and if she's going to be the first, then we'll have to deal with that issue."

Bertinelli, meanwhile, likens the situation to that of "Fargo."

"Small towns are much more interesting," she says.

Adds Harry Hamlin: "You meet a smaller group of people and you become very intimate with them in a shorter amount of time. It's more shocking than it would be in an urban environment."

If "Night Sins" gives Bertinelli and Hamlin regular employment, she's ready to peel back the layers of her character.

"There's so much about the characters that I'd like to find out about and play with," she says.

Says Hamlin, "I think another small-town format would be really interesting and probably pretty kinky."

Over the years, Valerie has completed, are you ready for this, seventeen made-for-television movies/miniseries, three feature films and three television series. From "I Was a Mail Order Bride" to "Night Sins," Valerie's television movies have been highly successful.

Lifetime cable presented a bio about Valerie in April 20, 1997 in one of their "Intimate Portrait" series. This Intimate Portrait, which was narrated by Faith Ford, included exclusive family photographs, as well as interviews with actors Harry Hamlin and Jane Leeves ("Frasier") and producer Norman Lear. Many paragraphs of which this bio you're reading is from the special with added commentary and facts where needed and often made more clearly.

Valerie and CBS have a deal to develop a new series, and it's probably going to be an hour series (this was in 1997, but no news since the deal), and we'd like to see her do an edgy 10 o'clock adult show.