Jane Seymour part of sweet formula in 'Dear Prudence'

Jane Seymour part of sweet formula in 'Dear Prudence'

Dear Prudence" may combine more proven TV elements than any movie in recent memory: a warm, beautiful workaholic who needs to pause long enough to find romance, the tough rural cop who turns out be a sensitive romantic, the amateur sleuths who turn out to have incredible investigative instincts and the phony cad who's trying to wreck an entire town to feed his own greed.

It also has Jane Seymour and Jamey Sheridan, who are both, as usual, pure pleasure to watch.

All this doesn't add up to a great movie, alas. But it's as comfortable as a late-summer cocktail on the patio, and because a Hallmark movie is as reliable as a Hallmark greeting card, we know that in the end, everyone will get what he or she deserves.

Prudence McCoy (Seymour) hosts a smart and chic helpful-hints TV show. She's a Martha Stewart character who's also a nice person off-camera. She has a tip for how to improve everything in life, from indisposed Labrador retrievers to bad coffee. She also has a loyal, incredibly ingenious young assistant in Nigel Forsythe III (Ryan Cartwright).

Her caring boss, however, sees a problem: Obsessive and overworked Pru needs a vacation. Actually, Pru needs a life, but one step at a time.

So he sends her to a luxury resort in Wyoming, where, being warm and fuzzy, she immediately befriends an American Indian woman whose son is found mysteriously dead a day or so later. The police say it was suicide. The mother isn't buying.

So Pru, since she has some time on her hands, sets out to discover the truth. She rings up Nigel, he flies out, and suddenly they turn into the greatest detective team since Indiana Jones and Short Round.

Eddie Duncan (Sheridan) is the good-hearted local detective who at first is skeptical of this New Yorker who wears the wrong shoes on a long woodland trek to the place where the young man plunged - or was tossed - off a cliff.

Soon, however, Duncan is inviting Pru for a drink at a local lounge, where she learns he also plays jazz piano. Any viewers who can't connect the dots from here should lose their license to watch any future Hallmark movies.

Along the way, Pru also discovers some secrets about her mother, whom she regrets she did not know better, and young Nigel runs into a young woman who, well, let's say he's now got his own dots to connect.

"Dear Prudence" doesn't seem to have any connection to the Beatles song beyond borrowing its title, by the way. But if this flick does well, and there's every reason to think it should, the Prudence character could return for future Hallmark mystery movies.

With a void in endearing female sleuths almost since Angela Lansbury hung up her powers of induction, it would be a shame if she didn't.