Ruin is just a click away in Lifetime flick

Actress Kelly Lynch first got my attention as a stone cold junkie in the 1989 film “Drugstore Cowboy.” Now she’s playing the mother of a teenage jock with a very serious problem in the cautionary TV drama “Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life” (8 p.m., Lifetime). Teenage swimming champ Justin Petersen (Jeremy Sumpter) has it all. He’s going to the state finals and is on track to get a huge scholarship. He’s got a sweet girlfriend, Amy (Lyndsy Fonseca), who’d be ever sweeter, thinks Justin, if she wasn’t so hung up on church and abstinence.

But Justin soon has other problems. While attending a party with a rougher crowd than he’s used to, he is exposed to Internet pornography. But while the other guys seem to take this rough material in stride, Justin develops and all-consuming interest. His mother, Diane (Lynch), notices, and demands that her husband have a talk with him. But Justin’s dad sees this as a normal rite of passage and even recalls the hidden Playboys of his youth.

Since this is a pretty predictable and didactic film, we soon learn that Dad’s boys-will-be-boys approach is outmoded. Internet porn is a pervasive multibillion-dollar industry designed to entice and seduce, and it’s all just a keystroke away. What we never learn here is just why Justin goes bonkers over the smut while his friends remain so blase. In quick succession, he loses interest in school, family, his sweetheart, the swim team and life itself.

Internet pornography may just be a 21st-century plague, but “Cyber Seduction” proves that the formula for movies like this really hasn’t changed much since “Reefer Madness.”

Tonight’s other highlights

¢ Teens sharpen their No. 2 pencils on “The Scholar” (7 p.m., ABC).

¢ Ray’s crack is not taken in jest on “Everybody Loves Raymond” (8 p.m., CBS).

¢ Robin Williams stars in the 1998 embarrassment “Patch Adams” (8 p.m., ABC).

¢ A Monty Python veteran invites you to the top of the world in the two-hour special “Himalaya with Michael Palin” (8 p.m., Travel).