September 14, 2007

What to Watch: Coming Up on Cable

Seth Arenstein finds Mary-Louise Parker acts circles around Mary-Kate Olsen, but says M.K. is well worth checking out on Showtime's Weeds — and more upcoming cable highlights.

Tube Stake: Programming Reviews by Seth Arenstein

GROWING WEEDS: Hunter Parrish and Mary-Kate Olsen.

• SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

Inside The Living Body, 8pm, Nat Geo Channel.

There are a lot of numbers to digest in this special that brings the viewer inside the human body at birth. The moments-old baby, whose insides are being shown on the screen with terrific camera work and what appears to be some CGI, has 100 thousand billion cells working together, we’re told. And then the first breath of the baby “is the most important” it will ever take, but it’s followed by “700 million more” before we expire. Later we hear of the “10s of thousands of miles of blood vessels.” All this to chronicle the first year of the body; “we’ll never change as much or as fast we do in our first year,” the helpful narrator says.

Speaking of digestion, we get a look at the process with an HD camera inside a slightly older child’s body. As you might expect, it’s fascinating footage, but not particularly appetizing. Oddly, the movement of the food down the hatch into the stomach doesn’t look unlike the funny treatment Woody Allen gave digestion in a memorable segment with Burt Reynolds and Tony Randall in the 1972 film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,* But Were Afraid to Ask. 

59th Primetime Emmys (pre- and post-coverage), TV Guide Network, 3pm ET; E!, 4pm ET.

You decide—wanna go dancing on the Red Carpet with Lisa Rinna and Joey Fatone (TV Guide Network at 3pm) or sashay a tad later with Ryan Seacrest and Giuliana DePandi and their Countdown to the Red Carpet show at 4pm?

It’s pretty much wall-to-wall coverage after that on both networks, although only E! returns Sun night at 11pm ET for a live post-show show (TV Guide Network's party special debuts Tuesday at 8pm). The evening before the big night each network has a Saturday preview show, with TV Guide’s version at 8pm and E! running a Creative Arts Emmy special at that hour. Both have the fashion police writing tickets on Monday; E’s unlikely duo of Kimora Lee Simmons and Carson Kressley does the honors at 4pm, while TVG’s fashion wrap is hosted by Lisa Rinna.

In a first for E! this year, the Comcast-owned network will offer a live simulcast for mobile phone users with Sprint TV, in addition to streaming its two-hour Live from the Red Carpet special online at E!'s broadband channel, The Vine.

• MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17

Inside The Actors Studio: Charlie Sheen, 8pm, Bravo.

Sometimes it seems like a chore for actors to undergo the James Lipton treatment, a deep and often painful investigation of every aspect of an actor’s life, starting from birth and progressing through drug addiction, domestic abuse, early flops and the break that got them to stardom. As is tradition with Lipton, the ordeal always involves multiple boxes of blue file cards.

Tonight’s different. It’s magic, actually. Charlie Sheen seems more than a willing participant, and he knows Lipton’s shtick as television’s most meticulous interviewer. Asking Sheen about his days as a high school pitcher, Lipton says, “What was your won-lost record?” Sheen: “I don’t know, 5-3, 6-2, something like that.” A quick stare and catlike smile from Lipton. Sheen: “OK, what do you have as my record?” Of course, Lipton had it precisely: 40 wins, 15 losses, much better than Sheen’s modest estimate. “Pretty damned good,” Lipton says. You could say that for this hour-long conversation, too.

The Truth About Food, series premiere, 8pm, Discovery Health.

Back when it was still called The Learning Channel, TLC used to do series like this with the BBC, mixing science with fun and coming up with some entertaining and educational results. This 6-part piece (2 shows per evening beginning tonight and running through Wednesday) poses questions about what we eat and can changing your diet improve your health, keep you young and slim you down?

Tonight we find out whether eating for 12 days like an ape (10 lbs/day of raw vegetables, nuts, fruit and 1 olive to provide salt) will lower cholesterol and blood pressure (did you ever meet a gorilla with a heart condition?). Basically the hypothesis is that our bodies are better suited to what they call the evolutionary diet. The fun part is that our humans are put into a zoo in Britain so they can live near their animal counterparts. There are also a couple of security guards assigned to the group to make sure they don’t, sorry, monkey with their diet.

There’s also an experiment involving that old chestnut, regularity. How much fiber does it take to give our guts—which are about 9 yards long—a makeover? Our experiment has two long-haul truckers working in Europe who are having trouble with regularity. The solution? Stuff them with fiber. The daily recommended allowance is 1.5 oz. They stick to this diet for 7 days. The fun part is that the truckers also swallow a pill with a different kind of fiber: a fiber optic camera that allows us to see the digestive process up close and personal. It’s interesting, but not pretty. Where it took 20-40 hours to move the pill out of their systems previously, with the high-fiber diet the trucker, er, moved their loads within 12 hours.  

Later tonight an experiment asks whether eating 4 cloves of raw garlic daily will improve one’s sex life? (It might, providing you can find a partner who can overlook bad breath.)

Weeds, 10pm, Showtime.

The hype will be all about Mary-Kate Olsen making her debut on the series as Tara, a bible-toting hottie/virgin (really) who makes the show’s heartthrob, weed toting Silas Botwin (Hunter Parrish), stand up and take notice. While Mary-Kate is smokin’ (you’ll see), the real action involves pot-pushin’ mama Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker), as she navigates her way through her supplier’s violent life. At the ep’s end, though, it appears that crime doesn’t pay. There’s also quite a bit of screen time for Sullivan Groff (Matthew Modine) as the sleazy fundamentalist real estate mogul puts aside land grabs in favor of grabbing either Nancy or neighbor Celia (Elizabeth Perkins).