Kevin Pollak, courtesy Showtime

THE LITTLEST SUSPECT – KEVIN POLLAK

Friendly Rating: Middle school and older.

Safety Rating: Some language issues, but mostly mild.

Quality Rating: Slow start, but ultimately funny.

One-hour special airing on Showtime at 11 p.m.

I’m surprised this special airs so late at night.  Unlike most stand up comedians, Pollak is not dropping f-bombs every which way or making jokes about his or other genetalia.  Okay, there are a few naughty words, but they’re minimal.  That he’s a bit of a stinker, well, that’s comedy.  And he is very funny.

Pollak has been known mostly for the celebrity impressions he does – William Shatner, Peter Falk and Alan Arkin are the three most featured here.  The advantage here is that even if your kids never saw Columbo or Little Miss Sunshine or any of the above guys, Pollak is funny enough that his bits are funny standing on their own.  Such as calling a TV interview show as the guest star and claiming that the guy being interviewed is a fake.  The bit, itself, is funny.

Hopefully, it won’t inspire any phone pranks from your offspring.  And you may want to emphasize that Pollak is playing jokes on friends of his.  But, hey, if phone pranks are the worst your kids get into (and I mean the harmless “is your fridge running, better catch it kind.”), then you are golden.

Louise Roe with Subject, courtesy The CW

PLAIN JANE

Friendly Rating: Teen chicks and older.

Safety Rating: Borderline – gender issues, some mild sex joking, and questionable tactics.

Quality Rating: Blah, blah, blah.

Series premieres tonight on The CW at 9 p.m.

Makeover shows have their place on the planet.  I guess.  The idea with this one is that fashion expert Louise Roe gets requests from girls with less than stellar features and wardrobes and helps them glam up and get it together for an important event.  In the premiere, Cristen wants to tell her best buddy – a guy – that she’s had a major crush on him for years.

Now, you can talk it over with your kids as to whether or not Cristen really needed to glam up to do what she needed to do – and whether it’s a reflection of look-ist values or not.  That being said, there is a certain confidence one can derive from looking one’s best.

The other positive thing about the show is that Roe goes right to the heart of the matter and gets Cristen facing her fears, which I can support.

But does this offset the fact that most of the Janes are actually rather attractive young women?  I haven’t seen any heavy girls, for example, although I’ve only seen a couple of the Janes.  Or does this positive note offset the zapper used on Cristen to get her to say the right things while learning to flirt?

And, finally, the show is just not that interesting.  We’ve seen makeover after makeover.  There’s just not that much new here to make it worth watching.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the whole lookism thing, so feel free to comment and start the dialogue.

Kristin Alioto and Tony Robbins

BREAKTHROUGH WITH TONY ROBBINS

Friendly Rating: Middle school and older.

Safety Rating: Some bleeped language under duress.

Quality Rating: Pop psychology 101 – if that’s fun, you’re gold.

Series premieres tonight on NBC at 8 p.m.

My biggest single thought while watching this show was “Do as I say, not as I do.”  I’m not saying Tony Robbins doesn’t have some good things to say about getting past the baggage and other nonsense most of us use as excuses to stay stuck in our personal mires.  But I’m sorry.  Most of us can’t afford to go sky-diving, let alone in Fiji, to re-awaken our feelings of personal power.

Admittedly, I’m one of those folks who cannot understand jumping out of a perfectly good plane just for the fun of it.

Basically, an Oprah Magazine on steroids, the show is an Extreme Makeover: Head Edition for folks who can really use some help getting past some serious stuff.  For example, the couple in the premiere episode, the Aliotos.  The night they got married, he jumped into a shallow pool and broke his neck, turning him into a quadripelegic.  And they were having some trouble getting past this.

Enter Robbins and the trip to Fiji to go skydiving.  Ummm.  Most of what Robbins encouraged the couple to do, they were able to do right here – like listen to each other and step off the guilt-go-round long enough to check into each other’s feelings.

Oh, dear.  Mummy’s sounding cynical and cranky again.  I’m not sure what Robbins’ background is – NBC lists him as an “entrepreneur, author and peak performance strategist.”  Wikipedia defines him as a “self-help author and motivational speaker.“   Oddly enough, I see nothing about his academic background.  A cautionary flag, but I’ve met wiser folk who had no formal education, so that’s not necessarily a problem.  Your mileage may vary.

The bottom line is that Robbins has some interesting things to say about getting past the dreck.  It’s a little simplistic.  The settings are more than a little ridiculous.  So if you do as he says….. <shrug>

Gordon Ramsay and Faruq Jenkins, courtesy Fox Networks

MASTERCHEF

Friendly Rating: Elementary and older, depending on interests.

Safety Rating: Lots of bleeped language and some flirting.

Quality Rating: Compelling and yet….

Series premieres at 9 p.m. tonight on Fox.

I think my husband summed it up best.  He wandered by as I was watching Chef Gordon Ramsay eviscerating one of the contestants on this competition show supposedly celebrating amateur cooks and said, “You know how insecure people feel when they’re cooking for their families, this ramps it up considerably.”

You’ve got three professional judges putting the contestants who make the cut through various challenges to find out who is the best of them all – and ready to perform professionally.  In other words, American Idol for cooks, which is probably my biggest problem with it.  I just can’t figure out how you’re going to celebrate home cooking by turning the best of home cooks into restaurant chefs.

I’m not a bad cook by any stretch of the imagination, but there is no way in Hades you would get me to cook for Chef Gordon Ramsay, Joe Bastianich or Graham Elliot.  Maybe Elliot, but he tends to play the Paula Abdul role, if you know what I mean.  There was one moment in the episode airing tonight when Ramsay (appropriately) calls one of the contestants on his nonsense, claiming that “arrogant chefs are as common as blonds in Hollywood.”  When I told my friend Victoria about it, she said, “Yeah, pot calling the kettle blond.”

My biggest fear is that we humble home cooks will feel judged by this show – as if our humble efforts aren’t very good just because we can’t plate like a pro.  Well, feh, I say.  Admittedly, there won’t be a lot of things to be learned during the audition part of the show.  But we can turn down the chatter and learn as the contestants do.

And, if I’m really painfully honest here, the very fact that I had such a visceral reaction to the show does speak well of it.  Good TV gets us excited.  Good TV can motivate us, anger us, get in our faces.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, even if, in this case, all it does is inspire a solid pbbbbbbbblt at a bunch of arrogant jerks who wouldn’t know good home cooking if it slapped them in the face.  I just hope it doesn’t freak out those of us who are lucky if the meat doesn’t land on the salad come dinnertime.

One thing the guys did point out – good food is about the passion, about the love.  And if the love is there, it’ll be okay.  I promise you that.  Now, flip them the bird and get cooking.  You don’t have to be a Masterchef to be good enough for your family.

FriendlyRating: All ages and species.

Safety Rating: Totally safe.

Quality Rating: Fun, informative, but competitively pointless.

Special airing tonight on Animal Planet at 8 p.m.  Please note, no pictures were available from the network and I thought posting pictures of my crew would be too precious.

The good news about the special is that it’s a good way to learn about cats and dogs and their respective virtues.  Plus, it presents a lot of good facts about each critter.  But a competition?

Okay, I get that this all to be taken as tongue in cheek.  And I get that people do have strong opinions regarding their preferences.  But setting folks up to fight like, well, cats and dogs, is a bit ridiculous.  Or maybe I’m just annoyed because I love both dogs and cats (have two of each at the old homestead, all of whom are reasonably spoiled), and while they are all different, each critter has his or her own virtues and bring a great deal of joy to mine and my husband’s lives.  In a world that is so polarized on so many issues, can’t we find some room to appreciate differences instead of facing off to determine who or what is better?

And while the information is fun, as are some of the competitions, you could tell it was all rigged to come out even until the bitter end. like the loyalty competition.  A cat and a dog are each placed equidistant between their owner and a platter of a favorite treat, tuna for the cat and bacon for the dog.   Trust me, my cat Dorothy Parker would drop me in favor of some tuna in a heartbeat because she is a tuna junkie.  She’d be bathing in that platter.  On the other hand, my dog Moses would turn up his nose at bacon if it meant I’d be playing with him.  Treat training him was a total loss because he’d rather run than eat.  Does that mean either are more or less loyal to me?  Horse manure.

You may want to talk to your kids about this.  Ask them if they really think cats or dogs are better than the other and maybe see if there’s some room for coming together and appreciating what is wonderful about each.

Michael Symon, Courtesy Scripps Networks

COOK LIKE AN IRON CHEF

Friendly Rating: Teens, maybe elementary age.

Safety Rating: Very safe.

Quality Rating: Mostly fun, more informative.

Series premieres on The Cooking Channel tonight at 10 p.m.

Finally, a cooking show that has some application to real life.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love Good Eats – the science and other information provided by Alton Brown has really elevated my cooking skills.  But if Brown can find a hard way to do something, he does it that way.  Feh.  I don’t have time to play that game.

In this show, Chef Michael Symon, who is one of the Iron Chefs on the U.S. version of the show, currently on The Cooking Channel’s mother Food Network, shows us how he pulls it together on Iron Chef by taking a secret ingredient – in the episode I saw, lamb – and pulling together some dishes using that ingredient.

The cool thing is that you can learn some useful tips on how to prepare a meal quickly, which most of us do.  Let’s face it, when you’ve got kids whining, a spouse/partner grumbling and everyone is pooped from a long day at school or the salt mines, it’s pretty tempting to chuck it all and head for the fallen arches.  It’s not good for you and your family, so you don’t.  Or maybe you do.  But maybe if you know it’s only going to take half an hour to get dinner on the table, then maybe that’s more bearable than hauling everyone out to the car.

I will say the show isn’t perfect.  Symon encourages folks to download the recipes at cookingchanneltv.com and doesn’t really talk about substitutions.  And depending on recipes only slows you down in the kitchen, especially when the recipe calls for fresh lemon and the one in your fruit basket looks like Albert Einstein on a bad hair day.

But then, no cooking show deals with that kind of real life scenario.  And until we get one where the host is forced to figure out how to do chicken parmigiana in an hour when the freaking chicken is still frozen solid, this show will have to do.

Don’t be afraid to check back (hopefully, by Thursday), as The Cooking Channel – what used to be the Fine Living Network – has a new show called Cook Like an Iron Chef that I really liked.  And I’m assuming I’ll be able to squeeze time to post it in between cleaning toilets and attacking the mending back up in time to get enough grown up clothes to wear to Tour.

Did I say something about resting?

Friendly Rating: All ages.

Safety Rating: A fair amount of slapstick comedy.

Quality Rating: But it’s soooo funny!

Half-hour special airs tonight at 8 p.m. on Nickelodeon, kicking off a week of new Penguins cartoons.

The Penguins of Madagascar has always been one of those shows, with its slightly irreverent wit and slapstick silliness, that is genuinely family-friendly.  Not always family-safe, if you’ve got young ‘uns too young to understand that slapping people hurts.

This adventure, in which the Penguins and crew try to find a cursed treasure before the rats get it, is beyond hysterical, though, and on so many levels.  It’s a total Indiana Jones-style pastiche, right down to strange pictograms and Skipper commenting on the action that this is the traditional time for the team to start fighting each other.

However, slapstick humor is one of those gray areas for a lot of parents.   It’s not really violence, in that nobody gets hurt.  Kids generally get it pretty early on that if they try something they see in a cartoon, it’s going to hurt, even if they haven’t quite separated out the difference between reality and fantasy.

On the other hand, there can be a meanness to slapstick that just isn’t fun.  Can you say The Three Stooges?  And when you have that, I think you can make the argument that slapstick adds to the problem of violence and cruel world syndrome (which according to one guy I heard a long time ago) is the greater problem with TV violence.

The big difference between Larry, Curly and Moe slapping each other around and King Julien using one of his subjects as a hammer, is that the Stooges were acting out of anger and meanness and trying to top each other.  Julien is just so blissfully full of himself, it doesn’t occur to him that what he’s doing could hurt someone.  And I gotta warn you, the actual bit is really horrifyingly funny.

There’s an old saying that farce is tragedy with the pain removed – and I think that’s what’s at play here.  Sometimes you may need to look at someone doing something awful and laugh at it to relieve your own feelings of wanting to use, say, an annoying sibling as a hammer.  But talk to your kids about it.  Ask them why they think that sort of thing is funny and why it’s not funny when it happens in real life.  And please feel free to share what you come up with.

Justin Kelly, Kellie Martin and Brady Smith, Courtesy NBC

THE JENSEN PROJECT

Friendly Rating: All ages except the very youngest viewers.

Safety Rating: Perfectly safe.

Quality Rating: Would be really good, but for the ham-fisted dialogue.

Series premieres with a special two-hour episode tonight at 8 p.m. on NBC.

On one hand, there’s a lot to be said for The Jensen Project.  It’s creates a lovely amount of dramatic tension with a bare-minimum of violence – just some butt-kicking to get away from the bad guys and a threat on a kid.  On the other, the writers seemed to have missed the subtlety boat and it doesn’t help.

Shades of Eureka (alas, without the wit) The Jensen Project is this super-secret ultra-high tech science group dedicated to saving the world with its inventions.  Alas, as a character says, “the things we make to save the world are only a step or two away from destroying it.”  Worse yet, son of the late founder Edwin Jensen (David Andrews) has left the project to become a bad guy.  Enter the Thompson family: genius scientist Claire (Kellie Martin), her husband Matt (Brady Smith), an internist, and their son Brody (Justin Kelly).  Claire used to be Edwin’s protege until he decided to steal her work and shame her into leaving the project.

But thanks to Ingrid (Patricia Richardson), the new head of the project, Claire gets sucked back in, along with Matt and since Brody is no slouch, either, he pushes his way into his folks’ work and adds his own unique skills.  Eventually, as the series goes on, the family will have to learn how to work together to defeat evil.  Or at least Edwin Jensen.

I love the concept.  I love that they are able to create a show that is reasonably family-safe that is also reasonably exciting.  I just wish the writing weren’t so heavy-handed.  We hear at least five or six times that Claire’s issues with Edwin have messed the family up and that they all have to talk more.  Even as Brody get congratulated for his help, Ingrid reminds him that he did it disobeying his parents’ orders.  And while I like the fact that she’s pointing this out, did she have to do it in such a blah, in your face way?  Not to mention the mean, nasty guy who’s hired Edwin to make nano-bots for him.  He’s really, really mean.  Not nefarious or even scary.  Just a bald-faced mean guy.  Yawn.

There’s part of me that hopes it gets better, but right now it feels like a pro-family organization wrote up what they think families should sound like that real people.  Too bad, because you’re going to get a much better picture of what families should sound like if you write real people in the first place.

So the next time a rap star or football player drops the f-bomb on a live show, the network or stations won’t get fined for it.

According to the story, the court wrote, “The FCC’s policy violates the First Amendment because it is unconstitutionally vague, creating a chilling effect that goes far beyond the fleeting expletives at issue here.”

You can read the whole story here.

But before everyone panics, let’s think this one through.  The circumstances cited in the ruling are relatively rare – a fleeting expletive uttered during a live broadcast.  It doesn’t mean foul language, in general, is acceptable.  There are, to the best of my knowledge, clear guidelines in place on that.  It just means that if someone goofs up and says something naughty during a live broadcast, the networks aren’t going to get fined for something that was beyond their control.

I can understand not wanting our kids exposed to bad examples on TV, as if seeing it on the screen magically legitimizes the behavior.  But if you, as a parent, are already watching with your kids, you’re already in the habit of questioning the behavior of those they see on TV.  So how does being on TV legitimize the behavior?

I can also understand not wanting to listen to foul language, especially in circumstances where you can reasonably expect not to hear it.  And that’s fair.  Furthermore, there’s good reason to believe that the networks might just abuse the privilege.  So if they don’t want restrictions back in place – specific ones – then they’d better not abuse things.

So let the dialogue begin.  Is this a good move on the part of the courts?  Do you think the networks are going to behave responsibly?