'Coming Out of the Ice'

Coming Out of the Ice (CBS, Sunday, 8-10 p.m.) is a relentlessly dreary drama with elements of Koestler's ''Darkness at Noon,'' Kafka's ''The Trial,'' and Solzhenitsyn's ''Gulag Archipelago''--before it comes to its inspirational conclusion.

Shot mostly in Finland, it's the true story of a young American caught by circumstances in the Russian bureaucracy, forced to spend many years in labor camps, all the time dreaming of the freedom due him as an American citizen. When he is finally released after 18 years of mental and physical torture, he returns to the city of his dreams--Detroit.

This drama, directed by Waris Hussein and starring the sullen-faced John Savage and a fine cast of mostly British actors who use their English accent as if it were Russian, captures the grimness and despair of Siberia as it pays tribute to the soaring human spirit.