Consenting Adult

Movie-of-the-week about a gay young man who comes out to his parents. Martin Sheen plays the father--frustrated, embarrassed and angry--who turns his son away, but mom Marlo Thomas reaches out to her boy with love and understanding. TV not tackling taboo territory, but taking baby steps (still); it's about as sexually frank as the glossy coming-out opus "Making Love" from 1982 (and with just a whiff of a mention of "that disease" that dare not speak its name). Writer John McGreevey, adapting Laura Z. Hobson's novel, keeps shifting the narrative back to the parents--ostensibly because Sheen and Thomas are the movie's stars. Naturally, the straight-laced couple would be shocked and confused by their son's revelation (that's only natural), but just whose story is this?