“Michael Landon, theFather I Knew”

Sunday at 9 on WCBS/Ch.2

AS a freshman director, Michael Landon Jr. makes a good candidate for 24-7 therapy.

“Michael Landon, the Father I Knew” plays like the letter you’re supposed to write to but not send to the parent with whom you are at emotional odds.

Young Landon has wrestled for much of his privileged and troubled life with the disparities between the family-friendly image his father cut on TV and the devastation the senior Landon left in his wake as he traded his families in for newer models.

Eight years after Michael Landon died of pancreatic cancer, he’s still got the upper hand over his son.

There’s not even much camp quotient in watching John Schneider (upstaged by the succession of ever pouffier and wavier wigs) playing opposite Cheryl Ladd as Landon’s second wife Lynn, who stole the TV star from his first wife Dodie only to lose him to a makeup artist with whom Landon would start a third family.

Michael Jr. is still unable to accept that he didn’t grow up in the Beverly Hills equivalent of “Little House on the Prairie.”

Despite his awkward dream sequences that try to convince himself and us otherwise, he’s still living in the shadow of his father.

Indeed, he’s still sponging off him.