Feb 19, 2010 Filed Under: News & Rumors,Who Do You Think You Are? Comments (0)

Adapted from a long-running UK series — what else is new? — the upcoming U.S. version of Who Do You Think You Are? otherwise comes from an out-of-the-ordinary source.

The NBC series, premiering March 5th after the Winter Olympics, is from former Friends star Lisa Kudrow and her Is or Isn’t Entertainment company.

Kudrow, in a teleconference with TV writers, says she first saw an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? while vacationing in Ireland.

“And I wondered why we don’t get to have that show in the U.S.,” she recalls.

The celebrity-driven genealogy series premiered in 2004 on the BBC and has been picked up for an eighth season. NBC has ordered seven episodes of its version, which begins with Sarah Jessica Parker taking what the network describes as “not one, but two awe-inspiring journeys” to Northern California and then Salem, Massachusetts.

Kudrow herself is the subject of the third episode (on March 19th), in which she travels to Belarus to uncover her family’s history with the Holocaust. She knew, from her father, Lee, that her great grandmother, Meri, had been murdered by the Nazis. But she had never been to the site of the atrocities.

“In some ways I was in denial for a long time,” Kudrow says. “My family, they got out. They didn’t go through any of this. So I didn’t feel like investigating it . . . I was afraid just to explore the massacre of my great grandmother and her friends and neighbors. I was afraid of what I would feel.”

Kudrow’s father had researched much of his family’s past, but unanswered questions remained. Who Do You Think You Are? solves most of the puzzle, with Lee Kudrow telling his daughter at episode’s end, “You did good. You did good.”

Might her dad be more impressed with her diligence in this endeavor than with her signature role as Phoebe Buffay on Friends?

“I think he felt I did this for myself, but also for him,” Kudrow says. “I didn’t audition for Friends for my father. But this is something that’s a gift to him. I think that’s how he felt about it anyway. He was getting all this information he didn’t have after working so hard on it. He also knew that it was hard what I did. He got pretty emotional because he was seeing me in pain.”

Kudrow says that she and and her production company partner, Dan Bucatinsky, “initially went to friends to see if they were interested” in tracing their family trees for the purpose of a TV show. “And a lot of them said, ‘Sure.’ ”

No former Friends castmates are in the first seven episodes, but that’s a possibility if NBC renews the series, Kudrow says. Besides Kudrow and Parker, the participants are Matthew Broderick, Emmitt Smith, Brooke Shields, Spike Lee and Susan Sarandon.

Research was done beforehand, to ensure that the celebrity’s family history was interesting enough to entertain a television audience. Otherwise, “they’re all learning as they’re going along,” Kudrow says. “That’s why everyone was nervous.”

She emphasizes that the series is life-affirming and inspirational, a trait not always associated with reality TV programming.

“We’re not looking for dirt on anyone,” Kudrow says. “We’re not looking to make anyone cry. We’re just giving them information that they never knew about before. Susan Sarandon, she didn’t fall apart at all.”

NBC is giving Who Do You Think You Are? a heavy dose of promotion during its Olympics telecasts, which so far are drawing 25 percent more viewers than the 2006 Winter Games from Torino, Italy.

“More is better in getting the word out to the audience that a show is going on,” Kudrow says. “I love that NBC is getting back to basics and putting on quality programming. I just want them to shout it from the mountaintop.”

And during the Winter Olympics especially, that’s decidedly do-able.

Source.