TV REVIEW : AIDS INFO AIMED AT YOUNG AUDIENCE

Though it’s as predictable as sunrise and perhaps a shade on the sanitized side, CBS’ “An Enemy Among Us” works effectively in delivering a straight shot of basic AIDS information to a younger audience.

Originally planned as a “CBS Schoolbreak Special” but moved into prime time (tonight at 8 on Channels 2 and 8), “Enemy’s” story line is simple: Popular 16-year-old high schooler Scott Fischer (Danny Nucci) becomes infected with the AIDS virus after a blood transfusion.

Scott’s parents (Dee Wallace Stone and Stephen Macht) are shocked/angry/supportive. The community in general and in particular the Fischers’ close friends--whose daughter Karen (Tammy Lauren) dates Scott--exhibit the dramatically expected fears/prejudices. Scott is pulled from school until the school board decides if he can return, and Karen’s parents tell her she’s not allowed to see Scott any more.

While these dramatic problems are resolved with few surprises, the lessons about AIDS are pedagogically delivered by an immunologist and AIDS educator played by singer Gladys Knight, who makes a laudable dramatic TV debut. Though some AIDS researchers recently have raised concerns that the threat to the U.S. heterosexual population has been greatly exaggerated by media, Knight’s character’s message is unmistakably clear: Everyone is now at risk.

Her lengthy and frank but tasteful lecture to a classroom of high school students includes the advice to “Hold off sex until you’re older. . . . There have always been valid religious, moral and emotional reasons to wait,” she says. “Now there’s another reason--AIDS. The key is responsibility. Whatever choices you make, make them like the adults you are becoming.”

It’s hard to find fault with “Enemy’s” responsible, if basically amoral message, though it takes the safest, potentially least-offensive road by having Scott get AIDS through a transfusion, which is a very rare method of getting AIDS. (According to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, U.S. AIDS victims are homosexual/bisexual males (66% of all cases), intravenous drug users (16%), homosexual i.v. drug users (8%), heterosexuals (4%) and the rest hemophiliacs (1%), transfusions (2%) and undetermined (3%).)

The acting is generally good, especially Nucci’s, and the ending is handled exceptionally well by Arthur Allan Seidelman, who directed from a script written by executive producer Joseph Maurer.