DVD REVIEW: WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? SEASON ONE

 

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STUDIO: Acorn Media
MSRP:  $39.99
RATED: Not rated (references to slavery, the holocaust, and other historical terror)
RUNNING TIME: 293 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• SDH subtitles

The Pitch

Celebrity genealogy!

The Humans

Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Emmit Smith, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Broderick, Brooke Shields, Susan Sarandon, Spike Lee

The Nutshell

Where do celebrities come from?  Other celebrities?  Not always!  Now you can watch famous people track down their ancestors with the help of expert genealogists and historians.  Long-unsolved family mysteries are finally cracked, distant relatives in foreign lands are befriended, and some people are surprised to learn that they’re more black/less black than they thought.

 

 

 

The Lowdown

The introduction to each episode calls the cast “seven of the world’s most beloved celebrities” but your mileage may vary on that.  They mixed it up demographically by including two African-American participants, but we won’t be finding out where any Asians or Latinos come from.  You might notice two of the participants of this show are married; those poor children will have so much family history to learn about.  At least some of the stories have cool celebrity cameos from various historical figures like Frank Sinatra or King Louis XIV but kids probably don’t think Italian Crooners or French Kings are cool anymore.

 

 

History is full of all sorts of bad shit so it’s inevitable that people’s ancestors were mixed up in it.  WWI, WWII, and the Civil War obviously make somewhat expected appearances, but the Salem Witch trials are more surprising.  The Slave Trade and The Holocaust obviously come up for the black and Jewish participants, but there is more of a purpose than merely tugging at your heartstrings.  It raises questions and reveals there are still fresh mysteries to solve.  Is the mysterious distant relation who informed Kudrow’s father’s family of their grandmother’s death still alive somewhere in Europe?  Does Spike Lee have a white distant cousin living in America?  Why did Brooke Shields’s grandmother abandon her family?

 

 

Some of the tragedies are smaller scale and more humane.  Someone discovering that they lived a few hours drive away from a long lost relative for decades but didn’t know it and now it’s too late because they’re dead is pretty emotional stuff.  Even finding out about a great great grandmother living in a foundling home can be troubling.  The past was pretty nasty.  Somebody’s grandmother got pregnant at 12 by the “boy next door” (age 19) and the scandal wasn’t the conception itself, but that she didn’t want to raise the child.  Someone else discovers a veteran-relative who, as a first response combat medic, saw some intense shit even by the standards of world wars, but never spoke of it to his family, not even to tell them of his numerous decorations and awards.

 

 

The production values occasionally feel like reality TV, with annoying music, pointless voice-over, and recapping that was unnecessary even before they show had the commercial breaks taken out.  The opening credits feature awful faux-inspirational chanting music and inexplicably features every celebrity even though each episode only focuses on a single subject.  The opening credits are not the proper place for a season long teaser.  They really should have used Jean Knight’s Mr. Big Stuff as the theme song instead.

 

 

I thought some of the celebrities might be annoying, but since this is personal material there’s a certain reluctance to overcome that causes them to be a little more subdued.  Which is to say, they are more relatable than you might think for being big shot celebrities.

That said, Spike Lee is kinda annoying.  I think he’s a fine director (Malcolm X is one of the finest biopics of all time and I even liked Miracle at St Anna) but he’s also a polemicist.  What actually bothers me though, is that he’s such a bad polemicist, all self-righteousness and no self-awareness.  He says at one point that it’s a ‘little known fact’ that black people used to be counted as 3/5 of a person in this country.  Can anyone really call that a ‘little known fact’ with a straight face?  Isn’t that literally the first thing that any American thinks of when they hear the phrase ‘three fifths’?  Or do they think ‘sixty percent’?

 

 

In case you ever forget whether or not Spike Lee is unrepentantly full of shit, just recall that he sued the Spike channel when it was brand new because it was supposedly ‘obvious’ that the name was attempting to capitalize off his fame.  Spike could take a page from Emmit Smith.  Observing the town square where his ancestors were sold at auction, Smith chuckles and shakes his head, wryly observing “America the beautiful.”  Insightful!

Pessimism doesn’t really translate well in this show, but curiosity and enthusiasm do.  Take for example, Sarah Jessica Parker, who is not annoying outside of her annoying TV shows and movies.  She gets genuinely excited when the gold rush figures into her ancestors lives, propelling them from Ohio to California.  I’m from California, so sometimes I forget that all this gold stuff is still new and interesting to other people.  They take her out in a field and show her some gold and she flips.  That works better than Spike Lee grumbling in somebody’s living room.

 

 

The most enjoyable part about the show for me was the weird trivia people found buried in their families lives.  Susan Sarandon learns that years before Frank Sinatra hit on her when he visited his friend Burt Lancaster on the set of Atlantic City in 1980, he was hitting on her grandmother in a wild club in New York in the 40’s.  Informative and gross!  If there is only one show about _____ on TV then that show is simultaneously the best and worst show about _____.  Genealogy isn’t really a TV genre (Maury Povich notwithstanding) so if you’re interested in the topic this is pretty much the only show for you.

The Package

Standard TV quality, no special features, but at least there are subtitles for the hearing impaired.

Rating:

Out of a Possible 5 Stars