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Dunham Massey House, courtesy PBS

SECRETS OF THE MANOR HOUSE

Friendly Rating: Older elementary and up

Safety Rating: Very safe

Quality Rating: Very good, especially if you’re a Downton Abbey fan

Documentary airs tonight on PBS, check your local listings for times.

Being something of a P.G. Wodehouse freak, I couldn’t wait to see this little film on the real live Edwardian era manor houses of a hundred years ago.

The good part about the film is that it is very focused on the early part of the 20th century – in what became the Golden Age of the Manor House society before it all went to heck after World War I. It also has a very strong thread about the incredible inequities that eventually led to the eventual dissolution of the manor house as it was then into a much smaller, but still lavish life style.

Aristocratic manor houses still exist, many of them as museums as their owners can no longer afford to keep them up. Wealthy, aristocratic and titled families still exist in England, as do weekend parties in the country, but you don’t usually find homes with staffs of up to 100 servants anymore.

As glamorous as those days seemed, as the doc points out, there were quite a few cracks and fissures in the social strata and it wasn’t quite the perfect world it seemed. Still, if you’re a fan of Wodehouse, Dorothy Sayers, Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey, this is the real life back drop for those wonderful stories, and as such, it’s a lot of fun and blessedly short.

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Darius (Romany Malco), Joel (David Hornsby), Gary (Justin Long), Megan (Kristen Bell), courtesy Fox

UNSUPERVISED

Friendly Rating: Pre-teens and up

Safety Rating: Everything you don’t want your kids to see

Quality Rating: Worrisome and yet, oddly sweet and charming

New animated series premieres on FX at 10:30 p.m. tonight.

You know that saying that says porn is really hard to define, but you sure know it when you see it? This show is a perfect example of something that has all sorts of worrisome things in it, including foul language, substance abuse, teens getting into trouble, violence, teens obsessed with sex and even some fondling, and yet it is clearly not trying to be shocking just for the sake of being shocking and as a result, is actually rather charming. I’m not sure how it does it, but it does.

The premise is that Joel (David Hornsby) and Gary (Justin Long) have been abandoned by their parents. Gary’s stepmother is nominally in charge, but as an alcoholic, she’s never around. So these two kids are basically raising themselves, trying to fit in with their peers, who are into all of the usual teen trouble, smoking, drinking, beating up on each other, and checking out sex. What makes Gary and Joel different is that they are really good-hearted kids, ultimately, and willing to do the right thing. They simply have no one to tell them what that is.

For example, in an effort to impress the two older neighbor girls, they invite them over. Only the neighbor girls turn the invitation into a party. Joel and Gary decide that’s pretty cool, and Gary cleans up the place. When he discovers that Joel’s last pair of undershorts is not only in shreds, it’s also a hand-me-down, Gary takes some of the money his stepmother left him for food and buys Joel his first pair of new undershorts. Later, when some tequila gets sprayed all over the two older girls, Gary cleans their tops for them.

Joel, when he finds the over-developed girl crying in his bedroom because the only reason the boys like her is because of her breasts, responds in the nicest way possible – he’s not that into breasts. Okay, it’s a lie, but he’s lying to make her feel better, not to get his hands on the breasts. He does, but it seems pretty clear that he is trying to make her feel better first.

Even with all the bad stuff going on (the town stud huffing a whipped cream can is the least of it), there’s an innocence to this show that I can’t explain. Truly, I was expecting to hate it, but I don’t. That being said, this is not a show that your kids should be watching unsupervised, but it may be a way to get to some of those more difficult talks with your teens. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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Screen shot from the Wikipedia English page

OMG! It’s the end of the web as we know it! Evil censorship will kill start-ups, strangle enterprise on the Internet!

The hype-sters are having a field day with the English Wikipedia blackout in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act being considered in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives right now, aka SOPA and PIPA.

These are the bills that will basically block certain foreign content on U.S. computers in an attempt to reign in Internet piracy of copyrighted materials, particularly movies and television shows, by posters from outside the U.S.

I am not going to take a hard stance on the bills either way – my mission here is more to help you make up your own mind. But the hype does provide a key exercise in news literacy. With all these entities screaming bloody murder about the bills, who do you believe? Is this a recipe for disaster? A hard-core lesson in unintended consequences? Or a necessary law to help protect a major American industry that’s already knee-deep in trouble thanks to the tsunami of Internet content legally available?

I am going to point out that my bias is leaning towards Wikipedia and Google, et. al., not because I think this will be the death knell for small independent Internet start ups, but because I think censorship of any kind is wrong and when protection against abuse of free speech is needed (such as copyright violation or child porn), it must be done with great care and with surgical precision. And nothing I have seen indicates this is happening with these bills. So that’s my little bit of salt for you to factor in to your own conclusions.

One of the things that first made me suspicious of what I was reading about SOPA and PIPA were the extreme claims of what the bills would do and the high anxiety level with which the claims were being made. “It will kill the Internet! Corporations will be the only ones able to post content! Everybody’s at risk of being arrested!” Common sense tells us that these sorts of extreme scenarios seldom happen. So when you hear these sorts of claims, the first thing to do is question who is making them and ask why are they taking such an extreme tone?

So then the next step is to look for the more rational response to the issue. A big shout out to my Facebook buddy Roni Jones, who found this article from the Stanford Law Review. It’s a little long and technical in both legalese and techno-speak, and it is clearly arguing against the bills. But it is thoughtful. The writers support the assertions they make with easy to reference and generally respected sources.

After that, you want to look at what the supporters of the bills are saying – and truth be told, I didn’t really find a lot. Admittedly, for time reasons, I didn’t dig that hard. However, the rationale behind the bills is that media companies need some way to fight the theft of their copyrighted materials by people over whom the U.S. has no jurisdiction. And that is an admirable intent. I make part of my living off of my copyrighted materials, so I’m very much in sympathy with that. It’s hard enough to make money on media content these days without all this competition from thieves.

But there is also something you might want to check out that may or may not help you decide: following the money. One of the blessings of the Internet are organizations such as ProPublica, a non-profit news agency, dedicated to investigative journalism for the public interest. You may know of other similar groups. The ProPublica site posted a list of all the members of the Senate, their stand on PIPA (the Senate bill) and how much money they received in campaign contributions from media companies and from Internet companies. There are a few exceptions (most notably Senator John McCain, who supports PIPA even though he got slightly more money from the Internet folks), but overwhelmingly the senators that got more money from media companies support PIPA and the ones who got more money from Internet companies don’t support PIPA.

This is not a blanket indictment of the U.S. Senate, but it is telling. Another part of this to consider is that the vast majority of the television programming we have access to, the movies in our theaters and our radio programming is owned by only six companies. Admittedly, it takes that kind of economy of scale to reach our population. But still, that’s an awful lot of influence to be held by six corporate giants. The Internet is a major equalizer in that respect. Whether these two bills will destroy that, I don’t know. The bills haven’t been finalized by a long shot. But the fact that donations from media companies seem to be having an impact on support for the bills in the Senate does not reassure me.

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Betty White, courtesy NBC

Why does everything have to air tonight?And right at the tail end of Press Tour, when I’m tired and all I want to do is curl up under a table and drool copiously.

First up,Nickelodeon has a Very Special Episode of its series iCarly, in which the kids’ attempt to beam a signal to their dad fighting in Afghanistan draws some unwelcome attention from the Secret Service. Good thing First Lady Michelle Obama shows up to bust a move. It’s part of the First Lady’s initiative (with Jill Biden) Joining Forces, which supports overseas military and their families. The show airs at 7:30 p.m.

Tonight NBC is doing its special for Betty White’s 90th birthday. I can’t vouch for the safety – you know there will be some off-color jokes, but how off-color, I don’t know because it was not available for review. The show starts at 8 p.m. and leads into a new prank show Betty White’s Off Their Rockers, in which senior citizens prank unsuspecting strangers with their bizarre behavior.

I saw several clips of that, and while it was funny, there was plenty of slapstick humor and several off color jokes featuring rather blunt talk from some of the seniors about their sex lives. The key here is that the pranks aren’t mean or mean-spirited, and a lot of them challenge our preconceptions of who older people are, so there are some positives there.

Fox’s new series Alcatraz is premiering tonight. I will try to get a full review up before 8 pm EST, but no promises. However, between the clips I’ve seen of it and the comments of my colleagues, it looks good, which will be a problem for those parents concerned about violence. It’s all about limiting the junk food, right? You and your kids may have to make some tough choices, but such is life.

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Courtesy Fox

NAPOLEON DYNAMITE

Friendly Rating: Elementary and older

Safety Rating: Fart jokes, lots of slapstick humor, fist fighting

Quality Rating: It just doesn’t work

New series premieres as part of Fox’s Animation Domination segment tonight at 8:30 p.m.

The word from my colleagues who were fans of the 2004 live-action movie about this animated small screen version of Napoleon Dynamite, the story of a listless teen growing up in a small town in Idaho, is that that show is not nearly as good as the movie, even with the original cast as the voices.

It’s hard to know where to start on all the failures of this blah little show. It’s offensive, but not very. There’s a little bit of wit, but not very much. The animation looks like a Mike Judge show and not in a positive way.

The opening episode features Napoleon (Jon Heder) and his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) fighting, as usual, this time over a gas station chicken nugget, which raises a bunch of zits on Napoleon’s forehead. So he picks up some acne cream that creates super human strength in him. In the meantime, Kip is trying to catch a girlfriend (voiced by Amy Poehler) who has a thing for bad boys, but finds Kip okay. Somehow, this all ends up with the boys fighting each other as part of a fight club in the town.

There are fart jokes, borderline sex jokes, and lots and lots of slapstick humor (using the term loosely, I assure you). But it’s mostly inoffensive, blah, same ol’, same ol’.

A lot of kids seem to like these shows. I highly recommend watching with them. But I won’t blame you if you don’t want to.

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