WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE?

“Who Do You Think You Are,”  NBC’s version of a Brit show, debuting Friday March 5, sounds more like parents admonishing kids than life-altering journeys. “I was hooked with the first one I saw, and I didn’t know who the person was, and I was riveted,” says Lisa Kudrow, an executive producer and subject of one of the seven episodes tracing people’s ancestry.
“We learn about history and how it impacts families and sets them on a different course. And how we end up because of it,” she says.
In the first episode, Sarah Jessica Parker discovers her roots in the U.S. stretch back to 1630. Her ancestor, Esther Elwell, accused of being a witch, was remarkably lucky. Days before her trial, the court, which had executed everyone accused, was disbanded.
Like the others who uncover their past, Parker is deeply moved. “It has changed everything about who I thought I was,” Parker says.
Former Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith and Kudrow, in separate interviews, talk about their emotional journeys. Like Parker, they begin with their parents. Smith travels around the South, including Burnt Corn, Ala., and eventually to Africa.
“It opened my eyes to the times and struggle of my people,” he says.
“It was an emotional and spiritual ride.”
Genealogists provide documents, and celebrities marvel as they examine papers that provide some answers to the question of who they think they are.
Additional episodes focus on Spike Lee, Susan Sarandon, Brooke Shields and Matthew Broderick. As compelling as the documentaries are, the NBC version has its flaws, mainly the annoying tendency to repeat itself as if viewers could not possibly recall what happened before commercial breaks.
By repeating so much, it squanders time better used detailing each subject’s heritage. Still, what is shown is incredibly moving. The harsh realities of how his ancestors had to live is driven home to Smith when a clerk hands him a record book about his relatives marked “colored.” His great-great-grandparents were born into slavery.
Kudrow’s great-grandmother was killed when Nazis invaded her town, forced the Jews into a building, made them strip, shot them, then torched the area.  Remarkably, Kudrow not only finds a very old woman who knew her great-grandmother, she also finds a distant relative who had delivered the news of what had happened. Kudrow’s father remembered him telling the story in 1940.
When Kudrow meets the old man, it’s remarkable.
“I knew about the Holocaust since I was really young,” Kudrow says. “I knew I didn’t want to explore it personally, and it wasn’t my first choice to go to Belarus to find where they were all shot.”
Her voice trails off as she considers her relatives’ hideous fate. “It was as hard as I thought it would be,” Kudrow says. “I was not so surprised, but boy, disappointed that there is a rage that comes up. I didn’t see a rage in Emmitt. Maybe he worked to get through to the other side.”
Smith is even-keeled as he says, “I just hope my story is inspiring and impactful in a positive way to hopefully encourage younger people to get on the crusade. The crusade is not to be negative: to continue to advance the ball of freedom, the ball of equality, and make yourself a better person because of the efforts of so many others who have come before you and died.”

DEPARTURES: A DREAM COME TRUE FOR THREE ADVENTURERS

So what do you do for a holiday when your job is to travel the world with a backpack visiting exotic places?
“Nothing,” says Scott Wilson, who co-guides the series “Departures”
with friend and fellow adventurer Justin Lukach.
The series, which starts its third season Saturday, March 6, on OLN, has taken the pair to such locales as Ascension Island, the Himalayas, the Cook Islands, the highlands of New Zealand, Libya, Mongolia and Antarctica. Wilson, Lukach and cameraman Andre Dupuis spend eight months of the year on the road and most of the other four months planning trips and applying for film permits and visas.
Their idea of a vacation, Wilson says, is “a normal life” — staying at home in Toronto, eating bland food and watching television. Then they “pull out the atlas and throw darts at it” and plan a new season. So if “Departures” isn’t the world’s best gig, it may be in the top 10.
As Lukach says, landing this job “was like winning the lottery.”
That’s something he seems to be making into a habit.
They were frustrated by the fact that they often found themselves “leaving the best stories out,” Wilson says. “We had been bitten by the travel bug. And we needed to find a way where we were going to be happier showing people and telling people how that travel experience was.” Meanwhile, Lukach had discovered a line of work that had taken him to Las Vegas and then Hawaii.  Then he got a call from Wilson, and life went from relaxed and exotic to strenuous and exotic.
Wilson had this idea for “Departures,” which would allow the pair to backpack around the world, picking the most off-the-trail destinations they could dream up. In other words, they would be getting paid to eat spicy food, see amazing scenery and have wild adventures.
One of the keys to the success of “Departures,” Dupuis says, is the fact that it’s “on-the-fly filmmaking.” Because they work with small high-definition cameras, they can actually record the authentic experience of backpacking to remote locations without dragging a film crew with them.
The original idea was to take a year off, travel the world, and then go back to their lives. Now that “Departures” has a cult following and eight Gemini nominations under its belt — including a best photography win for Dupuis — that plan is a distant memory.
This year, the three are visiting such countries as Russia, Sri Lanka, Rwanda and Papua New Guinea. High on their wish list are Iran, North Korea and Australia, Wilson says. “Honestly, anywhere I haven’t been, I see as somewhat of an open door — or a temporarily closed door.
“The memory that stands out for me is arriving in Antarctica and just seeing a place that, for the most part, is still so untouched. There are still places left out there. And since then, we’ve found a few places like that.
“Papua New Guinea certainly had its moments, where we felt like we’d fallen from one planet to another.”
Lukach agrees that there are still some places in the world that can evoke earlier times of voyage and discovery.
“The biggest quest for us is to find real authentic places.  We have found them, but it takes so much to get to those spots. We don’t get off a plane and drive for an hour. We get off a plane and trek in the jungle for three or four days.”

LOVE HATE & PROPAGANDA

Six-part series debuts Thursday March 4 at 9pm on CBUT.
Why a series on WW2? Because it has shaped the lives of millions of Canadians born in the last half century who know little about what happened, or how its legacy still affects them. This series will bring the dramatic events of the war years alive, and convey their importance in a powerful, human, and accessible way – to transfer the memory to a new generation.
Even seventy years later, the brutal statistics of WW2 have the capacity to shock: more than 60 million dead, six million Jews – and countless others – victims of genocide. Cities incinerated, the world map ruthlessly rewritten – an extraordinary level of violence that is still unmatched.
Love, Hate and Propaganda, a six-part documentary series, will bring the most important war in history into sharp focus through the lens of propaganda. This was the first modern war in which all combatants bombarded their citizens with messages: through newsreels and posters, radio addresses and songs, speeches and rallies. The great – and the evil – minds of that era knew propaganda could awaken powerful
passions: love, devotion, anger, and hatred. They employed truth, half-truths and sometimes outright lies, used powerful symbols and persuasive words to sway entire populations. Today’s viewers, familiar with every kind of messaging, will discover how war was sold around the world by these early practitioners of mass propaganda. Every movie house, school, newspaper and radio became a forum for persuasion and manipulation.
Above all, Love, Hate and Propaganda is a series that explores the psychology of war. Why did some enthusiastically follow while others bravely resisted? How could a young shop owner in Berlin come to believe that murdering civilians was a necessary part of asserting German pride? Why did a teenage girl in Japan believe her country had a divine mission to ‘civilize’ all of Asia at the barrel of a gun? Why did Hollywood believe it was necessary to demonize the Japanese in order to persuade Americans to fight? And, in the darkest days of WW2, how did so many manage to keep faith and fight evil when all seemed hopeless?
Love, Hate and Propaganda is about the art of mass persuasion but the series also features stories of love, courage and sacrifice that inspired others to go to war. Liudmila Pavlichenko, known as the “most dangerous woman in the world,” inspired almost one million women to join Stalin’s armed forces. In Canada, there was widespread public fascination with a beautiful young woman known as Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl. This clever PR campaign by the Canadian government generated huge support for the war effort and produced a genuine tabloid celebrity. And in Japan, wartime leaders made a hero out of Ensign Sakamaki Kazuo for his bravery at Pearl Harbor, only to later airbrush him out of history when they decided he was a traitor.
Love, Hate and Propaganda captures images and stories never seen before on Canadian television. The six-hour series combines sequences shot in HD with a rich array of historical footage. The visual resources are vast: newly available films and archival material (from Russia and China, among other sources) will reveal stories that were previously inaccessible. The series will speak from the vantage point of the 21st century about a time when the world seemed to go mad.
Viewers of all ages will draw their own conclusions about whether mass propaganda is as potentially persuasive today as it was then, and whether conditions still exist within our societies for such a tragedy to recur.

LIFE AFTER DEXTER GETS THE BENZ

It’s a good thing Julie Benz is a self-described workaholic. In addition to recently completing two independent films, the Pittsburgh-born actress is in the middle of a four-episode arc on “Desperate Housewives” and has “Uncorked,” a sunny romantic comedy on tap for March 6. Not bad for someone whose popular character on Showtime’s “Dexter” was snuffed by a serial killer just last December.
Then again, on-screen death never has stopped Benz, who made her first big-time splash as a dramatic actress playing Darla, a va-va-voom vampire on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel.”
She isn’t allowed to reveal much about Robin, the stripper whom Susan Delfino (Teri Hatcher) takes under her wing on “Housewives,” but says working on the hit ABC Sunday comedy series had her feeling a little star-struck herself.
“I am honored to be part of the Wisteria Lane world,” says Benz, 37.
“And to work with all these great women! I’ve done a lot of male-dominated shows, so it’s so amazing to be in a show that’s female-dominated.
I had a moment where I was working with the whole cast, and got so engrossed in watching Teri Hatcher work and thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe I’m here!’ that I missed my cue.”
She completed “Uncorked,” in which she stars with JoBeth Williams, Elliott Gould and “Men in Trees” hottie Scott Elrod, over her last hiatus from “Dexter,” in a calculated move to do something more lighthearted and family-oriented than the dark drama.
Benz couldn’t have known it at the time, but her day job on “Dexter”
had a nasty surprise waiting for her in season four: Her loving but emotionally fragile character, Rita Morgan — wife of the title character played by Michael C. Hall — was murdered by the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow) in the gut-wrenching season finale.
Benz and her cast mates — including Hall and his on-camera sister/off-camera wife, Jennifer Carpenter — weren’t told that Rita would die until a couple of days before the final scenes were shot.
Benz still sounds a little shaky when she talks about that on-camera demise.
“No one was expecting it,” she says. “After I got over the shock of losing my job I got over it.”
Benz knows acting careers sometimes take unexpected zigzags. She credits “Buffy” and “Angel” creator Joss Whedon with reinventing her as a dramatic actress when he plucked her from relative obscurity on sitcoms to play Darla, who “sired” the soulful bloodsucking character played by David Boreanaz.
“Joss Whedon’s belief that I was talented enough to play Darla really gave me the shot at being a dramatic actress that no one else was giving me a chance at during that point in my career,” she says. “It sparked a whole different interest in me as an actor.
“That was an amazing training ground. They encouraged us to challenge ourselves and not make mistakes. It was a safe place to work, and the writers gave me this very damaged woman to play. It was a really good experience for me, especially working with David. He and I used to laugh because his acting is really ‘small’ and very internal and nuanced, and I can be very big, so we kind of balanced each other out.”
Partly because of her happy experiences with “Desperate Housewives”
and “Uncorked,” Benz currently is jonesing to get back into comedy, she says.
“It’s something that really interests me,” she says. “The right show will come along. I am totally Zen about that. I’m reading a lot of scripts, but I’m a lot pickier now. It’s like the second time you get married. You know what you want.”

GERVAIS SHOW DRAWN FROM REAL-LIFE CHATS

No one ever could accuse Ricky Gervais (“Extras”) of not being animated. If anything, the wisecracking British writer, producer and comic — and co-creator of the original Britcom version of “The Office”
— shares the same manic sense of humor and creativity as America’s Robin Williams.
But Gervais — along with longtime collaborator Stephen Merchant and their friend and associate Karl Pilkington — gets animated in the literal sense in “The Ricky Gervais Show,”
a 13-episode HBO comedy series premiering Friday, Feb. 19.
Drawn from the trio’s record-breaking podcasts, the series features Gervais and Merchant engaging in spontaneous chitchat on a variety of topics, usually reacting to the consistently out-of-left-field comments by Pilkington, who originally began working with them as a radio producer. Each time Gervais or Merchant tossed a question to him, however, Pilkington’s off-the-cuff — and often monkey-centric — responses invariably proved to be comedy gold.
The HBO series overlays simple animation onto those unscripted podcasts, which have not been tampered with in terms of their content.
“We wanted to be retro (in the animation style) because we thought some of the subjects we handle are quite out there,” Gervais explains.
“They are quite taboo subjects. We thought if (the animation) was too spiky or trendy, it would just be too off-putting. So we wanted it to be sort of cozy and sweet and cuddly, because some of the things that Karl has come up with are incredible. I mean, he thought Anne Frank was just avoiding paying rent.” “We asked him once about evolution, and he said, ‘Yeah, I know about evolution. It goes germ, fish, mermaid, human,’ ” Merchant says. The evolution of “The Ricky Gervais Show” itself deserves a little attention, too. Merchant — the red-haired beanpole sidekick to the shorter, stockier Gervais — first met his future work partner when Gervais hired him as an assistant on his first radio show, which was fairly short-lived.
“It really is an amazing good fortune that we met through his laziness and incompetence and my incredible youthful vitality,” Merchant says, “but also his talent. All that allowed us to make things happen.”
Those things included the original U.K. version of “The Office,” which became an international sensation, prompting the radio station that had fired Gervais from his first show to rehire the newly hot duo for another show built around music and chat. This time around, however, Gervais and Merchant insisted on having someone else on hand to cue the music and handle the show’s technical side.
“Karl Pilkington was a guy in the radio station who was willing to come in on Saturdays when the show was on and help us out,” Merchant explains. “We started asking him questions, and it opened up a whole vault of crazy anecdotes and bizarre views on the world. We never had heard anything like it, because even when you are professional comedy writers, you are still constrained by the way you see and understand the world. You have to refract everything through your own intellect, whereas Karl would just come out with the most extraordinary idiocy.
“Then he started telling us stories about his dad and other people he had grown up with, including a man who lived with a horse in his house. And he was telling us all these stories as if they were perfectly common. After a while we started asking him about more conceptual ideas, like the idea that if you had an infinite number of monkeys with an infi nite number of typewriters, at some point they would write the complete works of Shakespeare. To this day, Karl still cannot grasp that idea. He goes, ‘Well, where are we getting the monkeys from? Have they read Shakespeare?’ ” Merchant also cherishes a conversation that turned to pyramids.
“Now, I know that a pyramid is a tomb, as I am sure you do,” he says, “but Karl thought it was some kind of accommodation, maybe a house, and he was looking at the pyramid and saying, ‘Well, yeah, it’s got a really huge living room, but the bedroom is tiny.’ Only a man who honestly doesn’t know could come up with that, because if you were a comedy writer it wouldn’t occur to you that it would be a house. It would be too big a leap.”
The podcasts followed as both Gervais and Merchant’s schedules made doing a weekly radio show problematic, earning an entry in Guinness World Records as the most downloaded podcast of all time (“We’ve had about 190 million downloads,” Gervais says).
Although Gervais and Merchant aren’t shy about calling Pilkington things like “moron” and “idiot” during their chats, both men insist that their co-star is a fame-averse bloke who doesn’t take their jibes to heart. “He doesn’t fully understand what we are talking about,”
Gervais jokes.
“He’s not paying attention,”
Merchant says, adding with Gervais that Pilkington probably is thinking instead about whether a monkey ever could be prime minister.
Ultimately, though, both men insist they are immensely fond of their colleague.
“I don’t think he’s an idiot,” Gervais says. “He’s a genuine artist in the sense that he sees (the world) differently to us. I love Karl. I genuinely believe he’s a comedy genius, whether he knows it or not.”
“I think he’s made some money from the audiobooks of the stuff we’ve done, but he’s really not very ambitious, and he doesn’t much like to travel,” Merchant adds. “He doesn’t care about being famous. As long as he can pay the mortgage, he’s happy spending a day watching insects going about their business and trying to fi gure out what they’re doing.”

FAR-RIGHT FANATIC: AND PROUD OF IT!

Entrepreneur-investor-media personality Kevin O’Leary may be the least likely CBC star since Don Cherry took a liking to the drapes and tablecloths and had them cut into suits.
Lately, it seems that you can’t turn on CBUT or Newsworld without seeing a promo for “The Lang & O’Leary Exchange” or for “Dragons’
Den,” in which O’Leary co-stars with fellow entrepreneurs Arlene Dickinson, Robert Herjavec, Jim Treliving and W. Brett Wilson.
“Dragons’ Den” has been on hiatus through the Olympics — CBC prefers to not air one of its most popular shows against impossible competition — and it returns to the main network March 3.
Meanwhile, O’Leary can be seen daily on the CBC News Network, co-hosting the afternoon business show “The Lang & O’Leary Exchange,”
in which his views often make financial reporter Amanda Lang look like a Bolshevik. Plus, he launched a U.S. TV career last year as one of the panelists on “Shark Tank,” ABC’s version of “Dragons’ Den.”
And he’s also involved as an investor and co-host of the Discovery Channel’s series “Project Earth,” in which scientists look for ways to slow global warming. Yet he recently told the Boston Globe that TV is a “hobby.”
“I spend most of my day as chairman of O’Leary Funds,” he explains now. “We’re global investors. … That’s the science of my life. It’s very disciplined. I get up very early in the morning. I look at our results every day, work on the mandate, new products, new funds.
“Television is the art. It’s the yin and the yang. The chaos of TV counterbalances the discipline of investing.”
As for O’Leary’s politics, he describes himself as an “anarchocapitalist.” That is, he doesn’t think government should be allowed to do much more than build roads and wage war.
He has described the U.S. economy as “dead” and says Canada has to move away from U.S. exports because “that country will never grow again.”
“I’m very frustrated with government now,” he says. “And a lot of what I see today is criminal or bordering on insane, or both. When I see investments in Chrysler on behalf of the public, that is insanity. And I work as hard as I can in the media to fi ght that kind of madness.
The worst you can do as a government is to endorse mediocrity like that.”
One of O’Leary’s earliest ventures was in TV production, and he says he likes keeping his hand in the field — since the TV work fuels the part of his life that makes him rich.
“Television makes me a better investor,” he says. “I went to 30 countries with Discovery Channel, looking at infrastructure investing, and it made me a much better bond investor.
“So I think they go hand in hand.” O’Leary divides his time among West Palm Beach, Fla., Boston and Toronto and has investments scattered all over the world.
He credits his upbringing with giving him a “global perspective” and cites it as one reason he’s comfortable as a citizen of the world.
O’Leary’s father worked with the International Labor Organization in the 1960s and ’70s, and the family lived in France, Switzerland, Cyprus, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and Cambodia.
“It was a really interesting youth,” he says. “I met Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie when I was living in Addis Ababa. I met Cambodian Maoist Pol Pot and King Norodom Sihanouk when I was in Phnom Penh.
“I was a teenager, and I didn’t know how remarkable these experiences were. But they certainly made an impression on me later in life.”
Nowadays, O’Leary describes his politics as “hard-core capitalist.”
“The older I get, the more I go that way,” he says.
He tends to get irritated and animated when he talks about the “outrage” of government bailouts for companies such as Chrysler (but not U.S. banks) and the “idiot management” of Nortel.
The victims of such “idiot management” and government “outrage,”
however, have to fend for themselves, he says. Capitalism is self-regulating, and we just have to pick better companies to work for. “We need to be more personally responsible in this country,” he says. “There will always be Nortels. But we should never bail out failure.”
So “The Lang & O’Leary exchange” often looks like an accident that happened when a pundit from Fox News wandered onto the set and picked a fight with a CBC small-C conservative.
“I have a genuine regard for Kevin because he does believe what he’s saying,” says co-host Lang. “He’s not trying to get anybody’s goat.
He actually thinks this stuff. So I can forgive him for it.”

STEEDS TAKES HIGH ROAD TO KNOWLEDGE IN ‘SOLVING HISTORY

Everything in the “Indiana Jones” movies is true. OK, not every single thing, but chunks of it, and British journalist Oliver “Olly” Steeds wants to tell you all about it. At least this investigation didn’t require hallucinogens. Premiering Friday on Discovery Channel, “Solving History With Olly Steeds” sees the investigating adventurer, who also reports for the U.K.’s Channel 4, tackle several ancient mysteries, from the lost gold of El Dorado to the Nazca Lines in Peru — and that’s where the pharmaceuticals came in.
To understand the mystical significance of the mountaintop carvings, Steeds downed a solution made from the San Pedro cactus. In an earlier expedition in the Amazon, Steeds had tried another intoxicant and wound up spending eight hours attempting to live out the “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” sketch “Confuse a Cat.”
“I saw hundreds and hundreds of domestic cats in the jungle, who were being led by my old pussycat, Octopussy,” he recalls. “I was convinced that these domestic cats were the keepers of the holy truth. … If only I could confuse them, they would reveal to me this knowledge.”
Steeds can’t remember if he succeeded, but his Peruvian experience turned out a bit differently.
“I ended up tripping for a lot longer than we thought,” he says.
“There was a group of transvestite hairdressers in Nazca, at about 4 o’clock in the morning, who I ended up drinking with, who looked after me, strangely. And I wasn’t imagining it; they actually were there. It was quite surreal.”
Anyway, back to Indiana Jones. As fans of the first movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” may recall, the Nazis were hot on the trail of the Ark of the Covenant because Hitler was obsessed with the occult.
And then in the third movie, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,”
archaeologist Jones and his father, archaeologist Jones the elder, were trying to head off Nazis eager to gain immortality from the Holy Grail. According to Steeds, who’s been called a real-life Indiana Jones, the Nazis actually were mad for the occult, as shown in the Wednesday, Feb. 24 episode, “Hitler’s Mummies.” “Mummies, not his mum,” Steeds says, “His mum was called Clara, actually. She had nothing to do with this but spawning the devil.
“We look at it in terms of these mummies that were missing during World War II. They were being used as part of the whole physical anthropology, eugenics movement.
“We explore the role of the Ahnenerbe, this wing of the SS, this group of scientists and academics whose job it was to basically rewrite ancient history. They had expeditions all around the world. They sent an expedition to Tibet in the ’30s to go measure the heads of Tibetans. “Hitler and Himmler and others believed that there was this original master Aryan race, and they believe Tibetans were some of the last. In fact, Buddha was an Aryan.”
As to whether it bothered Hitler or Himmler that Buddha was likely not a blue-eyed blond, Steeds says, “That was one of the problems they had. Someone once mentioned to Himmler, ‘Hold on a minute; you’re not blue-eyed, blond-haired, super-Nordic.’ He’s like, ‘No, but I have an Aryan mind, an Aryan brain.’ Then he promptly shot the guy for asking the question.
“So we look at the role of the Ahnenerbe and how they rewrote history to present this ridiculous justifi cation for their racial policies that led to industrialized murder.” Also upcoming on March 3 is an episode looking at the truth behind tales of escapes from the infamous Devil’s Island penal colony off the coast of French Guiana, such as the one portrayed in the movie “Papillon.”
No mind-altering substances were required to investigate this tale, but Steeds did have to swim across a river.
“Not a good idea,” he says. “I swam it, and it was full of crocodiles.
“To be an adventurer, you need to be deluded,” Steeds continues, “and have a very bad short-term memory. Then you’ve got a chance of surviving, and you continue to be motivated to carry on and do stupid things.”
Also on the docket is an episode, shooting next month and airing in May (coinciding with the release of the Russell Crowe movie, “Nottingham,” directed by Ridley Scott), in which Steeds tries to track down the real Robin Hood.
“There’s a kernel of truth in all these stories,” Steeds says. “We’ve just started looking, and it looks like there is a connection to a Crusader archer who came back and was pissed off about something. He kicked off and started to rob the rich and give to the poor.
“There’s a theory that he was actually the Sheriff of Nottingham in his alter ego.”