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Katie Lowes, Columbus Short, Kerry Washington

SCANDAL

Friendly Rating: Older elementary and up

Safety Rating: Sex talk and bloody crime scene pics

Quality Rating: Good, but hasn’t hit its stride

New series premieres tonight on ABC at 10 p.m.

The way ABC has been pushing this show for the past several weeks, you’d practically have to have avoided the network completely to not have heard about it.

But you can tell it’s a Shonda Rhimes show, if only because the cast has a significant number of people of color in it. Rhimes is quite the rarity in TV – a Black woman producer – and her shows (principally Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice) have the most diverse casts on the tube.

Aside from wanting to support Rhimes, I have to say I mostly liked Scandal, which is about Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) a high-powered attorney who doesn’t practice law. Instead, she fixes things – namely takes care of other people’s problems in the Nation’s Capitol and makes them go away. Her gut may never be wrong, except around President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn), her former boss and, you guessed it, lover.

Personally, I think a president who is in love with his wife and faithful to her would be a far more interesting character, especially if Pope revered him for different reasons. But this guy is your standard slime ball, which makes him pretty tired. Other than that, the script pays tribute to Aaron Sorkin’s style of writing in a good way.

Safety-wise, there are definite issues with past violence – in this episode, some bloody crime scene photos – and some mild sex talk. Pope is also prone to playing some very hard ball and her crew plays fast and loose with the law, which is why they don’t practice it, we are told. Her employee family is rather dysfunctional, but still there for each other in some interesting ways, even to the point of helping one of them propose to his girlfriend.

If your kids want to watch this one, you’ll probably want to watch with them. You might get some interesting conversation on the gray areas of what we do or don’t do.

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Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair, courtesy NBC

BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

Friendly Rating: Early teens and older

Safety Rating: Talk and more talk about sex, and one repeated nude

Quality Rating: Meh

New series premieres tonight at 8:30 p.m. on NBC.

When Jessica (Jessica St. Clair) gets divorce papers Fed Exed to her, she does the only thing possible. She moves in with her best friend Lennon (Lennon Parham) in order to rebuild her life. The catch? Lennon is now living with Joe (Luka Jones), who loves that Lennon is so caring, but not wild about having Jessica come in and re-arrange his and Lennon’s life.

There are things to like about the show – the relationships have a certain charm and it’s really sweet how much Lennon and Joe are soul mates. But it’s not enough to give us a reason to watch.

Safety-wise, two-thirds of the jokes involve talking about sex, but nothing egregious. It’s not obsessive about it, but it is borderline, which may be why the show doesn’t really light up. The best bits are all about the relationship between the two friends and her boyfriend, where everyone is trying to do the right thing but aren’t sure what that is.

There is the possibility that with time, the show might morph into something genuinely entertaining. The actors and the relationships do have potential. Right now, it’s not there yet.

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Grand Coulee Dam, courtesy PBS

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: GRAND COULEE DAM

Friendly Rating: Older elementary and up

Safety Rating: Very safe

Quality Rating: More for engineering fans, but still interesting

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

The massive dam still provides enormous amounts of relatively clean electrical energy, enough to power the entire city of Seattle, Washington. It was and is a marvel of engineering. It also provided irrigation for miles and miles of farmland.

However, it also blocked salmon runs, helping to not only devastate that population, but the culture of the native peoples that relied on it. Not to mention the over 70 men that died building it. Then there’s the huge amount of federal funding that went into the project, which may or may not have helped our economy.

The good thing about Grand Coulee Dam is that you get both sides of the story of the building of this great project, mostly in the 1930s. the other thing that struck me was the politics surrounding it, which sound vaguely familiar. The film doesn’t speak to them beyond what was going on at the time, but you can’t help but notice the similarities to debates that are going on today, which is exactly why we study history. And films like this do help make history a little less boring.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t tremendous potential for the squirmies. This isn’t the most riveting film you’ve ever seen, either, and at an hour and a half, possibly goes on a tad too long. Then again, it covers the history of the dam up through the 1990s, which, when you consider that the seeds of the project were sown in the 1900s, is a lot of time to cover.

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Author Margaret Mitchell, courtesy PBS

AMERICAN MASTERS -

MARGARET MITCHELL: AMERICAN REBEL, HARPER LEE: HEY, BOO

Friendly Rating: Middle school and older

Safety Rating: Frank discussion of racism, picture of Mitchell on ground after being hit by car

Quality Rating: Interesting, but high potential for the squirmies

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

There are two, count them, two bio pics on PBS tonight, and depending on your affinity for modern American literature (and/or pop culture), you might favor looking at Harper Lee, who To Kill a Mockingbird, over Margaret Mitchell, who wrote the classic pot boiler Gone With the Wind.

Both novels look at the American South, both were made into classic films. And both bio pics frankly discuss the effects of racism on the respective works.

My problem is that while I consider Mitchell the less worthy subject – after all, GWTW is more pop culture than history, and is neither accurate nor a fair representation of slavery – hers is the more interesting bio pic  for two reasons. One is that you actually find out about her, her life and who she was. It’s also half an hour shorter than the Lee pic, which is filled with endless talk about the novel (including celebrities reading from the novel) and less about Lee. Apparently, Lee just isn’t that interesting a person. That being said, given how often To Kill a Mockingbird is studied in schools, might be worth a look at that film just to hear what your kids think about it.

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Rupert Murdoch, courtesy PBS

We’ve got a programming note tonight, partly because this show was still being edited when screeners would have gone out – there just happened to be a new development in the ongoing case again media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his employees’ illegal practice of scanning mobile phone calls last week. And partly because things at the old homestead are crazier than usual, what with having our one and only bathroom remodeled, along with other major repairs on the place, an elderly dog who is getting ready to cross the Rainbow Bridge and I’ve injured myself.

Anyway, this episode of Frontline, on PBS tonight, check your local listings for time, is important. It’s not about privacy concerns, although that’s part of it. It’s about how the news business works and how it should work. Keep in mind, Murdoch’s company owns Fox and the Wall Street Journal, not to mention other major media outlets around the world.

In the current media environment, with so many folks screaming to be heard, it’s important to know where your news is coming from. It’s also important to look at the different points of view and decide who’s making the best case for what is really going on. It’s a little too easy to just focus on those folks you agree with, but that’s not going to help to build a healthy appreciation for all the forms of diversity out there.

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