With the Friday premiere of NBC’s, Who Do You Think You Are?, Hollywood the Write Way is happy to present you with advanced reviews of the entire season all this week.
From Executive Producer Lisa Kudrow (“Friends,” “The Comeback”) — in conjunction with her production company Is or Isn’t Entertainment and the U.K.’s Wall to Wall productions, “Who Do You Think You Are?” is an adaptation of the award-winning hit British television documentary series. The seven-episode program will lead celebrities on a journey of self-discovery as they unearth their family trees that reveal surprising, inspiring and even tragic stories that are often linked to crucial events in American history.
In the third episode, actress, Lisa Kudrow “uncovers a tragic family story” as stated in the episode introduction. She gets the farthest in her search for her ancestors out of Sarah Jessica Parker, Emmitt Smith, and herself. Lisa visits her parents in Los Angeles, who are Eastern European Jewish and she spent an abundant amount of time talking with her father about her Grandmother and family who perished in the Holocaust.
This leads to Lisa traveling to Belarus, her Great Grandmother’s village where she meets with a Jewish historian and learns how her Great Grandmother died. Tragic family history doesn’t even begin to cover what viewers see. Visiting the pit where her family members were shot and fell into to die must have been quite traumatic for Kudrow, though all discovered on her trip did not lead to despair. Kudrow met one of her Great Grandmother’s neighbors who had quite a lot to say, which put a grand smile on Lisa’s face.
Even more exciting was ancestry.com leading her to Poland and a meeting with her long lost relative! Too bad most viewers at home cannot afford trips across the globe on their journeys into their family history. Anyway, it’s quite surprising and disturbing to find out how her relative survived the Holocaust and what an even more emotional moment when Lisa returns home to share the news of her trips with her father.
Not only does she update her father on what she has learned, but she connects her father with his long lost cousin and the rest of his family through webcam! This has been the best episode of Who Do You Think You Are? so far, as it packs such an emotional punch for not only Lisa’s family history, but all of the families who have been affected by such a catastrophic historic event. If there is one episode to watch of this mini doc series, it is this episode, which airs on March 19th on NBC.
Who Do You Think You Are? premieres March 5th at 8/7c on NBC.