How to Watch Small Sacrifices (1989): Streaming Options, Dvd Releases, and Viewer Faqs
When ABC broadcast the two-part miniseries across two nights in November 1989, it commanded tens of millions of living rooms. Director Richard Michaels bypassed sensationalized melodrama. Instead, he crafted an unflinching procedural around Diane Downs, the Oregon mother who drove her three blood-soaked children to a Springfield hospital on May 19, 1983, claiming a bushy-haired stranger attacked them on a rural road.
Farrah Fawcett shattered her Charlie's Angels glamour. She stripped away vanity to embody narcissism, pathological detachment, and volatile charisma. Opposite her, Ryan O'Neal played her married, obsessive lover Lew Lewiston, adding uncomfortable tension to an already sickening narrative. Unlike standard network melodramas of that era, the script drew directly from Ann Rule’s meticulously researched 1987 true-crime bestseller. Viewers were not treated to clean emotional resolutions; they witnessed an unvarnished examination of maternal sociopathy that continues to draw new audiences decades later.
