Can I interest you in "Hallmark" now?

Normally it takes about four hours to get from St. Louis to Kansas City, but in the case of "Loving Leah," it took longer than that.

The "Hallmark Hall of Fame" movie, starring Lauren Ambrose and Adam Kaufman as an unorthodox Jewish couple -- in both senses of the word -- may be set on the East Coast, but its journey from the stage to the screen ran straight down I-70, across the Show-Me State.

P'Nenah Goldstein, who wrote both the stage play and the screenplay, based "Loving Leah" on a story she had remembered from her childhood in St. Louis. As she told the Post-Dispatch in 2002, she was sitting shiva -- the Jewish mourning practice -- after the death of a relative when someone offhandedly invoked Deuteronomy 25:5, an obscure law which states that if the husband dies and leaves his widow with no children, "the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband's brother unto her."

The remark wasn't meant to be taken seriously, but it stuck with Goldstein, and when her career shifted from acting to stage managing to producing and finally to writing, she mined the childhood memory for all its worth. "Loving Leah" went through readings in her hometown and L.A. before finally getting staged six years ago at the New Jewish Theatre in St. Louis. And now TV -- it airs 8 p.m. Sunday on CBS.

In "Loving Leah," a cardiologist named Jake -- played in the TV adaptation by Kaufman -- is estranged from his brother for six years. Jake is a non-practicing Jew, but his brother Benjamin leaves home to join the Hasidim (or some similar Orthodox group) in Brooklyn, N.Y.

When Benjamin dies suddenly one day, Jake goes to his funeral, where he is introduced to Benjamin's childless widow Leah (Ambrose). The two have no plans to marry, of course -- it's only the first act, for heaven's sake! -- and no one in the community is seriously thinking they should. Certainly not Leah's mother, Malka (Susie Essman), who is not impressed with the hotshot doctor with no time for family.

But a complication arises in the course of trying to get out of Brooklyn, and that's when the two hatch a crazy plan to leave town together. Leah, it turns out, has ambitions to go to school and have the life other women who didn't marry so early are having. Jake, meanwhile, feels awful about not being in touch with Benjamin all those years. Also, as can happen to a secular Jew, he is feeling the pull of antiquity, the calling to be more observant.

So that's the premise. It's threadbare, and the execution skips over more lacunae than the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Sorry -- biblical humor.) But Goldstein has an engaging yarn on her hands, and she doesn't get hung up overexplaining things.

What really keeps "Loving Leah" moving along, though, is Lauren Ambrose. The moon-eyed redheaded wonder lit up many a scene in "Six Feet Under," amd while for most of this movie she keeps that long orange hair under a traditional wig, there's no hiding her sweetness, her lack of guile, her growing interest in Jake.

There's one departure from the play I find was unnecessary: Ira, as Jake is called in the stage version, was a ladies' man. In the movie, Jake is monogamous and seems to be well on the road to Blissville with another woman. And yet, faster than you can say "he's just not that into you," Jake's not that into her.

But c'mon -- this is Hallmark calling, and no one's going to be under any illusion that "Loving Leah" was based on a true story. The construction of the story is formulaic "Hall of Fame" -- narcissist learns to share with others through the unexpected gift of love. There's a reason a card company sponsors this show. But some cards are more fun to open than others.

For those who read all the way through this piece thinking there might be an explanation for that goofy headline, try this.