And, frankly, co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were not served well by their writers. The in jokes were so in even the insiders weren’t getting them.

I’m also a little frustrated at the mature content of the show – and it’s not like folks don’t know kids are watching. Case in point, all the presenters and winners commenting on their memories of watching the show and hoping to be just where they were.

Which does bring to mind one of the evening’s highlights, composer Michael Giacchino’s wonderfully inspiring speech about his parents’ support of him going off and doing creative things, “I know there are kids out there that don’t have that support system so if you’re out there and you’re listening, listen to me: If you want to be creative, get out there and do it. It’s not a waste of time. Do it. OK?”

But the thing that struck me was the vaguely mean-spirited banter between Baldwin and Martin – not typically Martin’s style, I assure you. And all the crass jokes. Granted, most of them probably flew over the heads of the youngest viewers, but they weren’t even funny. It was crass for the sake of being crass, and I am so tired of it.

But, hey, the dresses were cool, the dancing was interesting and the show remained, as always, inspirational. Not every kid out there watching and dreaming will win an Oscar. In fact, the vast majority won’t. But the kids who don’t dream don’t stand a chance of winning because they will never try.

It’s my favorite awards show. I’m not going to do any handicapping here. And while there are several movies that your kids may have seen, including the really young ones, do be aware that many of the nominated films are not for kids.

And it being a live event, stuff happens. I still remember the streaker. But if you’re watching with your kids, you’ll be able to put it in perspective and enjoy the show.

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.

Friendly Rating: Allowing for some eeuw moments when the sex stuff comes up, as young as early teens should find something interesting.

Safety Rating: Definitely a watch-with due to sexual themes – it’s marriage.

Quality Rating: Funny, but could pall quickly.

NBC, at 10 p.m.

The idea behind The Marriage Ref, as explained by creator and comic Jerry Seinfeld, is that almost every married couple has the one fight that they re-visit on a regular basis over and over again, and that what they really need is an outside referee to settle things once and for all. Based on an incident from Seinfeld’s life, the show features otherwise loving couples having a disagreement. A celebrity panel tries to convince host and marriage ref Tom Papa to take the side of one or the other and much hilarity ensues. Or that’s the intent.

On the safety side, there is a fair amount of sex talk, but these being married couples, I can’t get too worried about that. Sex is supposed to happen when you’re married and hopefully your kids can get the difference between a one-night hook up with that hottie from algebra and a committed for life relationship that will probably support new kids emerging.

I have to confess, I was prepared to hate this show when I first heard about it. I began to weaken when I saw the presentation at the TV Critics Press Tour last January – it sounded like it had potential. Then many of my colleagues lambasted it royally, based on last Sunday’s preview, saying that it wasn’t funny. And I believed them.

Which is why I was totally surprised when I found myself laughing so hard when I finally got around to looking at the DVR recording I had. There must be something to be said for low expectations.

On the negative side, Papa uses some inappropriate gender terms here and there – he referred to Kelly Ripa as eye candy and the fact that he said she was really smart does not mitigate that denigrating term. The show comes really, really close to making inappropriate fun of the couples – the fights in the preview were almost too ridiculous to believed. One guy wanted to stuff his dead dog and put the critter in a shrine in the living room, another wanted to install a stripper pole for his wife to dance on.

On the plus side, it’s pretty clear that these couples truly love each other. Neither of these fights are going to destroy their marriages. And there is some fact checking going on. When the husband who wanted the stripper pole pointed out that it’s good exercise, he got a back up because dancing on a stripper pole is good exercise. He just lost because he wasn’t willing to do the same.

But I think the bottom line is that anyone who watches this show expecting anything within the realm of information or insight will be sorely disappointed. The show is about comedy and entertainment using a situation we’re all too familiar with – fighting with a loved one.

My husband disagrees. But we don’t need a ref to fix this one.

I was all set to review Mayday! Bering Sea, airing at 9 p.m. tonight on the Discovery Channel. And like I noted above, I couldn’t finish it. It’s not that the show is bad. Alas, the reverse is true. It does its job a little too well.

On Easter Sunday, 2008, the Alaska Ranger, a professional fishing trawler, took off for a 12-day fishing mission. This being Alaska and all, it hit some seriously nasty bad weather, then in the middle of the night, it started taking on water. A lot of water. With 47 people aboard. And I know from the press notes that not all of them survived.

I know that there were several who did (kind of obvious since most of the talking heads are crew members) and that it was the “the largest and most daring maritime rescue in U.S. history.” I can make some guesses about who didn’t because of who isn’t talking in the movie.

But there I am, about a quarter of the way in, the first life raft has failed, the Coast Guard is a good hour away, and everyone is in their survival suits looking grimly at each other and… I just couldn’t take anymore.

Okay. I know I’m a weenie. But this is a good thing. If I can’t hack it, your kids probably can’t, either.

And if you do watch it, how many did they get out of the water? I really want to know. I just don’t want to watch it to find out.

NOVA The Pluto Files

Friendly Rating: Genuine, real family fare. Your toddler might not get the talking, but there are cool pictures.

Safety Rating: One implied threat of violence and one (appropriately used) naughty word.

Quality Rating: Excellent – who says science is boring and humorless?

On PBS, check your local listings for times.

So is Pluto a planet or not? In 200o, when the American Natural History Museum’s Hayden Planetarium decided that Pluto wasn’t exactly a planet, it eventually touched off a fire-storm aimed at the planetarium’s director and PBS regular Neil deGrasse Tyson. Media outlets took aim, angry third-graders (the grade when kids typically learn about the solar system) sent him mash notes.

And, as we find out from this whimsical little episode, even astronomers disagree, sometimes quite loudly, about whether Pluto is a real planet or an icy object out in this belt of other icy objects, the Kuiper Belt.

Tyson is taking on a serious subject here. But instead of being pedantic and boring, he approaches it with incredible humor – including one scene in the barbershop of Streator, Illinois, the hometown of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930. Implied threat with a razor, but it’s done so tongue in cheek only the most humorless person would find fault. Better yet, Tyson doesn’t mind being the butt of the joke.

But what’s more important here is that you have genuine and strong differences of opinion, and yet, everybody is civil and good-humored. They joke about the conflict, but they don’t put each other down and Tyson gives everyone their say with a great deal of respect. And – wow – people respond to his opinion with respect.

So, as comedian Jon Stewart concludes at the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Pluto is a planet, a dwarf planet or an icy object. It’s all part of how our understanding of our universe changes as we learn more about it. As long as we still get to call it Pluto.

Parenthood

Friendly Rating: Young teens might enjoy it.

Safety Rating: You’ll want to watch with them – sexual themes and language issues.

Quality Rating: Little more than okay, but it has its moments.

Based on the movie (which I know I’ve seen but don’t remember it being like this), the show is about the Braverman family. With parents Zeek (Craig T. Nelson) and Camille (Bonnie Bedelia), and their four adult children, all of whom have kid issues.

The pilot has a plotline going in 30 different directions, thanks to the fact that you’ve got a huge cast and only 50 minutes to set up their primary conflicts with each other. Which maybe why the show just didn’t feel that good to me.

Safety-wise, there’s a reason this show is on at 10 p.m. and it ain’t just to fill the space left by the crash and burn of the Leno experiment. There’s a fair amount of sexual activity and talk going on. One of the teen-age daughters is smoking and mis-behaving badly, but it’s pretty clear that this is not behavior that’s endorsed.

There are two main plots in the pilot, airing tonight. Sarah (Lauren Graham) is facing money troubles and moves her two teens back home to her parents’ place. Her older brother Adam (Peter Krause) is having trouble with his youngest son Max (Max Burkholder), who is diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. And, actually, it is Adam’s grief and the way he challenges his father that makes for the one really touching moment in the episode.

While the Asperger’s angle is interesting, the rest of the show just seems a little too obvious and pat. I’m willing to bet one of the adult kids is going to get divorced – my money is on high-powered attorney Julie (Erika Christensen), although next in the running is Adam.

It might provide some grist for the conversation mill – what with the teens acting up all over the place. A good conversation might be based on how the parents could behave more like parents. Or it could sink slowly into the mists of cancelled programming.

Need to point out that no preview screeners were sent out for The Marriage Ref, which if you’ve been watching the Olympics, you’ve surely heard about. It’s the show in which host comedian Tom Papa referees couples’ fights to get them finally over and done with. The preview is on Sunday (2/28) at 10:30 p.m., after the Olympics, with the actual premiere on Thursday, March 4. I’ll put up a review then.

Also, tonight Fox is presenting the 41st NAACP Image Awards, celebrating the accomplishments of people of color in literature, music, television and film. The event kicks off at 8 p.m. and since it’s live (unless you’re on the West Coast. Sigh.) there’s not much I can say about it – just the usual cautions about live events. And while I find most award shows total yawners, this one might be fun because it celebrates folks who too often still get forgotten.

Finally, on Sunday, PBS’ Nature series is repeating probably the funniest nature doc I’ve ever seen, Is That Skunk? Check your local listings for times or you can see what I originally wrote about it here.

And that’s the weekend.

More interesting is ABC Family’s announcement today that Bristol Palin, daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, will appear as herself on The Secret Life of the American Teenager later this season.

While the temptation to joke is pretty durned strong, the release pointed out that part of the purpose of the episode (and the series) is to highlight how tough it is to be a teen parent, presumably with the hope that teens will either stay out of each others’ pants or use birth control.

One can hope. The last time I saw the show, which airs at 8 p.m., I wasn’t too impressed. Drama-wise, it’s decidedly okay. Educationally, it may be. Last week I pointed out a study that suggested that programs showing the consequences of unprotected sex can prompt some young women to use birth control.

And this can be the kind of show that can get you and your pre-teens talking about sex and how to behave appropriately. How to say no and how to use birth control when the time and the partner is finally right.

So how do you talk to your kids about sex and birth control? Please chime in.

Women’s short form figure skating is up tonight, but check your local listings for the exact time, since it’s mostly tape-delayed.

And enjoy. This is aspirational TV and even if you and your young ‘uns are the antithesis of Olympic athleticism, you can stay active with the sport of your choice. Just don’t let how good these folks are give you an excuse to stay couch-bound. You don’t have to be able to do all the spins and jumps and whatever to have fun ice skating.

King Tut Unwrapped

Safety Rating: 3,000-year-old stiffs, but otherwise safe

Friendly Rating: All but the youngest viewers

Quality Rating: Really interesting with some decent story-telling

Discovery Channel, Part One Feb. 21, Part Two Feb. 22, both at 8 p.m.

Truth be told, the mummies were unwrapped a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean we know all that much about them. The reality was, way back in ancient Egypt, mummies were moved all over the place to keep grave robbers from stealing all the cool gold and stuff the Pharaohs had buried with them in an attempt to take it with them. Which is one of the reasons that finding the tomb of Tutankhamun intact in 1922 was so remarkable.

What’s even more remarkable is that we’re able to pull sufficient genetic material from these mummies to figure how who’s who and more importantly, who’s related to whom. And that is the basis of much of Sunday’s part of the program. Given that a whole lot of the action takes place in a lab – which does not provide the most fascinating visuals – director Brando Quilici did a phenomenal job making the show worth watching.

I have to give Dr. Zahi Hawass a lot of credit for his segments. He’s pretty personable and even though the special runs for two hours each night (Monday focuses more on what Tutankhamun died of), it moves pretty well.

Please keep in mind, part of my fascination with the Amarna period and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb has a lot to do with my love of the Amelia Peabody series of mysteries written by Elizabeth Peters, starting with Crocodile on the Sandbank and most recently with Tomb of the Golden Bird – which fictionalizes the discovery of Tut’s tomb by Howard Carter. (Please note that you can support this blog by clicking on the Amazon.com ad to the left of this column to buy either of the above books.)

The Family Crews

Safety Rating: Mostly safe, but you may want to monitor just in case

Friendly Rating: Probably okay for all ages

Quality Rating: Not bad for a reality show

BET on Sunday (Feb. 21) at 9 p.m.

Get this – when actor and former football player Terry Crews played Julius (dad on one of my faves, Everybody Hates Chris), he was apparently coming from a very real place. He’s a father of five kids and has been married to Rebecca for 20-odd years and the show is about his life.

While it doesn’t happen in the first episode, the eldest daughter does get pregnant, but since she’s 22, it’s not quite the same issue as if she’d been still in high school. But that seems to be the worst of it, safety-wise. Given that this is on BET, I wouldn’t bet on it staying that way, but ya never know.

Another thing working in the show’s favor is that it’s only a half-hour long. Crews, being a basically decent human being who adores his wife and is enormously proud of his kids, is nonetheless, not the most exciting person on the planet (although he conceded at the press conference last January that it was a good thing the cameras were around when he found out his eldest was preggers).

How much of it is actually real, that’s always the question with these shows. That being said, I can assure you the episode about him and his family getting evacuated thanks to a brush fire is real. I know for a fact that it is because the Crews family lives in a gated community about a good half mile north of me and I remember that fire. We could see the flames on the hills from my living room window. And we ran into the show’s crew in our church’s parking lot that Sunday. Not to mention that several friends of ours who live in the same gated community as Crews were also evacuated.

I’m sure once the producers realized there was minimal property damage (and none in that gated community) and no loss of life, they were doing a major happy dance. Talk about great visuals – heck, even as far back from the flames as we were, I could see the planes flying into the smoke and gasped at the immediacy of it all.

Admittedly, if the show ends up on our personal DVR, it’s as much about the fire footage as anything. But it’s not a bad show and might provide some good conversation fodder.

I’d love to know if you agree or not, so please comment.