KXLY
January 19, 2021 4:00 AM
Matt Roush, TV Insider
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A selective critical checklist of notable Tuesday TV:
Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (8/7c, PBS, check local listings at pbs.org): You never know what skeletons lurk in someone’s genealogical closet. In the seventh-season premiere of Harvard professor Gates’ captivating series that explores celebrity guests’ ancestries, actress Glenn Close and cult director John Waters are dismayed to learn of slaveholders in their families’ privileged pasts. “It makes me feel a sense of shame,” says Close, who nevertheless feels “stronger” when told of Quaker and Puritan forebears who helped found the nation in its Colonial days. (She’s also delighted to learn one of her ancestral lines connects with Princess Diana.) Waters loves hearing Gates declare, “Your family tree drips with drama,” and blurts, “It sounds like a movie scene I’d write” when treated to a newspaper clipping of a forefather’s bizarrely random death.