TV REVIEW : ‘Substitute Wife’ a Pioneer Love Story : Farrah Fawcett is transformed from prostitute to bride in 19th-Century Nebraska. It’s an unusually frank network film.

“The Substitute Wife,” a unique love story about sod-busting pioneers on a 19th-Century Nebraska plain, features a frankness and sexual maturity rare for network movies.

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Co-starring Farrah Fawcett as a village prostitute who’s transformed into a prairie bride, the movie’s originality (from a terrific script by Stan Daniels) brings temporary luster to the network movie genre and NBC.

At times funny, daring, endearing and unpredictable, the production has the texture and flavor of Willa Cather’s Nebraska fiction--except that the values espoused in “The Substitute Wife” would shock most mortals both then and now.

A spirited prairie wife and mother of four (Lea Thompson) discovers she is dying from a suspected tumor. Determined to wrap up important matters with the time left her, she strikes out to find a marriageable woman to fill her place in the conjugal bed and on the farm in order that her husband (Peter Weller) won’t be left to tend the land and raise their children by himself.

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It’s a time in the remote West when single women were a novelty and men found wives by literally mailing off for them. Fawcett’s substitute wife, though, is no demure mail-order bride. She’s a “good whore,” she declares with an edge of pride and disdain. “That’s why I can compete with girls half my age.”

The husband’s reaction to his wife’s eye-opening selflessness and the prostitute’s arrival at his door is one of the movie’s ample surprises.

Weller’s quiet, oaken-like solidity (except when he’s having congress with first Thompson and then Fawcett) is brushed with humor and virility. Thompson is a beacon of love with an irresistibly magnanimous heart. And Fawcett, whose tumbling, Goldilocked curls belie her rough past, nicely segues from peevish self-involvement to a woman who learns to change diapers, shovel buffalo chips and anticipate the husband’s nocturnal visits (in an arrangement designed and encouraged by the dying wife).

The sex, under Peter Werner’s measured direction, is realistic and forthright as opposed to smirky-glossy or coy.

* “The Substitute Wife” airs at 9 tonight on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39).