NBC’s new show looks suspiciously like what Dr. Henry Louis Gates has done on PBS, but ain’t bad. Hallmark Channel has another formulaic romance that may or may not be bad.
Who Do You Think You Are?
Friendly Rating: Good for all but the youngest viewers
Safety Rating: Nothing graphic, but does cover some of the uglier parts of our history
Quality Rating: Good, but PBS did it better.
NBC, Friday night at 8 p.m.
Who Do You Think You Are looks at several celebrities as they try to uncover the clues behind their ancestries. For example, actor Sarah Jessica Parker finds a great-grandfather (or great, great) who left his family to go to California during the Gold Rush in 1849.
Granted, our history does have its ugly aspects – slave ownership, for example. The good thing about the series is that it doesn’t seem to back off those less than glamorous parts of our history, but treats them and the people involved with respect.
Alas, the premiere episode, featuring Parker, will probably be its downfall. I like Parker as an actress. But in the episode, she comes off like a total ditz.
Part of the problem is that we’re supposed to see how finding your roots makes history personal – as former NFL star Emmitt Smith says at the end of the second episode notes, “history is my story.” And he’s right and that is the best part of this show.
But Parker takes it too far, getting all upset when she finds that one of her ancestors died – over a 150 years ago. Yes, he was younger than he “should” have been, and while the story’s ending is sad, Parker gets a little more emotional about it (and one of her other ancestors) than makes sense. You want to personalize history. You don’t want to re-live it.
Then again, yours truly has mostly con-men and hookers on her family tree and isn’t worked up about it. And Smith doesn’t get too broken up about the fact that one of his ancestors was basically raped by the man that owned her. He doesn’t like that it happened – who would? And yet, he has to accept that the rapist is also one of his ancestors. He does get a little emotional about visiting Africa, but it’s appropriate to the situation – not as if it were happening here and now.
My only other quibble with the show is that we don’t get to see much of the process of finding out how you find out these things. According to the credits, Ancestry.com has its fingers in the show, and gee, gets mentioned every episode. But the real work is done by archivists, librarians and historians – and we do get to meet them. We just don’t see how they do what they do.
Uncorked
Friendly Rating: Chick flick, but okay for younger girls and moms to share
Safety Rating: Pure as the driven snow
Quality Rating: Okay, but not great. Detail mishaps are a little crazy-making
Hallmark Channel, Saturday night (3/6) at 9 p.m.
She’s a workaholic corporate type. He’s a celebrity chef who believes in kicking back and focusing on family. They meet cute and we know how the rest goes. And, oh yeah, he’s a widower with a young son. I swear, first wives are the most endangered species on the Hallmark Channel. Lots of single women, a couple divorced women. But the dads are all widowers. Hmmm.
The twist here is that the story is set in California Wine Country – without saying which one. Besides Napa and Sonoma, we’ve got Mendocino, Paso Robles, Santa Ynez, not to mention several lesser known areas, some of which produce some durned good wine. Oh, wait. That’s my other hat as wine critic for OddBallGrape.com. That’s the wine blog my husband and I write.
I think that’s one of the things that made me crazy about this movie – it was either written by someone who sort of knows wine or changed by someone who doesn’t know much about wine. There are some things about the wine biz they get totally right – such as the opening scenes of grape picking and putting the grapes on a conveyor to pick out the leaves.
They talk about the granite-composition of the vineyard, which is something vineyard managers will talk about and in the same sentence, talk about syrah as a Bordeaux-style grape. Only syrah is grown in the Rhone Valley and is not one of the grapes traditionally grown in Bordeaux, France. They talk about San Francisco being a long way from the winery, which kind of sounds like it’s in Napa – only Napa is maybe an hour and a half away from San Francisco. With traffic. Sugar levels are a big part of telling when grapes are ready to harvest – tannins are just there in the skins.
Admittedly, this is the kind of wine geek stuff that your average viewer is not going to know or care about. But the problem is, the movie doesn’t get to the truth of wine-making or the truth of falling in love in wine country. Frankly, this story could have happened anywhere, in any industry. And has, come to think of it. Which is probably why the errors about the wine were so annoying and glaring.
There is also some very labored dialogue. Julie Benz, who plays the romantic lead, Johnny, has this high-pitched little girl voice that I can’t imagine gets anyone very far in a board room and we’re supposed to believe she’s a business shark.
But in spite of all these shortcomings, the movie does have a rather earnest charm that might make it bearable. If you’re not too picky. Or a wine geek.
