"Sweet Nothing in My Ear," the best Hallmark Hall of Fame production in more than a year, tackles a subject that television rarely examines -- deafness -- in a thought-provoking and moving way.

Jeff Daniels and Marlee Matlin play Dan and Laura Miller, a couple whose 8-year-old son, Adam, has been deaf since age 4. (In real life, the child actor Noah Valencia, making his debut, has been deaf since birth.) Dan is hearing; Laura is deaf.

Their son seems happy and well-adjusted, and he attends a school for the deaf where his mother is a teacher.

In what its creators believe is a first for a TV movie, the conflict centers on the issue of cochlear implants, which is controversial within the deaf community. The father wants to explore the idea of his son getting a cochlear implant, and the mother wants nothing to do with it.

Laura, the child of deaf parents (played by Phyllis Frelich and Ed Waterstreet), is proud to be deaf. She refuses to accept the notion that deafness is a disability or handicap, or that her son has a problem that needs to be fixed. For Laura, American Sign Language is as natural as speech is for her husband.

Dan believes that the surgery -- which involves drilling a hole into the skull and implanting an electronic device -- may improve his son's quality of life and enable him to hear again. He lambastes the idea that "political correctness," as he describes it, may prevent this from occurring.

Adding to the quandary is that according to research, the earlier a child receives a cochlear implant, the more effective it is likely to be.

Both parents want what is best for their child, but prejudices between hearing and deaf people -- even including distinctions between people who are born deaf and people who become deaf -- bring the couple to a legal separation and a custody battle over their son and his future.

Daniels, who spent months becoming fluent in ASL, and Matlin, who has potent chemistry with him, give their usual great performances in meaty roles written by Stephen Sachs, based on his play. The courtroom scenes bring many of the issues and emotions into focus, and a viewer feels sympathy for both points of view.

Bits of trivia: Matlin won a Best Actress Oscar for "Children of a Lesser God" in 1986, after Phyllis Frelich had won a Best Actress Tony for the play in 1980. And Waterstreet and Frelich co-starred with Mare Winningham in "Love Is Never Silent," a 1985 Hallmark Hall of Fame movie about deafness, for which "Sweet Nothing" director Joseph Sargent won one of his three Emmy Awards.

"Sweet Nothing in My Ear" forces the audience to confront its own prejudices and preconceptions, and for that -- and for many other reasons, too -- it's worth viewing.