“The Amazing Race: Family Edition” weaving a spell

CBS, 9 p.m. Tuesdays

 

I’m officially in love with the Weaver family – though not for all the right reasons. It’s not every day you see a mother have a complete nervous breakdown because she can’t get her tire out of a muddy patch in a driveway. It’s not every day you see the mother drive her van away, leaving her children behind as soon as she got out of the muddy patch either.

The weird thing is – apart from the apparent insanity that runs in the family, the Weavers are the only team left in the race that supports one another and seems to care.

Overall, the show is getting a bit better from week to week. Aside from the stupid task of walking through a rain forest to pick up plastic idols, the tasks also are getting better.

Look at the detour where one member of each team had to search through hundreds of pounds of coffee beans to find a single red one. Now that is classic “Amazing Race.”

Perhaps I’m being too easy on the show, since it isn’t even near the quality of the fifth or sixth season, but no one can totally hate a show that cuts to commercial with an 8-year-old girl lost in a foreign country’s ghetto with her doll.

 

“The Apprentice: Martha Stewart” dog show diva

NBC, 9 p.m. Wednesdays

 

Jim needs to be destroyed. There is no way the producers can leave him around much longer: He is one of the most vile, contemptible characters to ever grace the screen of any reality show.

The disrespect he shows every person on both teams is jaw-dropping. The most blatant example was his all-night boozefest at the local Outback Steakhouse, where he insulted all the women on the team for daring to ask whether the team should at least discuss its work, placed both feet on the table in a lame attempt to act like an alpha male and got so drunk he began to drool.

Then again, Jim didn’t seem like he was the only tipsy one in that episode. Did anyone else notice that when Martha showed up at the dorms for an impromptu visit, she wasn’t acting quite like herself? She was slurring her speech a tad and couldn’t walk in a straight line.

If Martha was indeed tipsy, it was probably Jim that drove her to drink anyway, so all is forgiven.

However, I am not forgiving Martha’s daughter for acting like a robot every time she is onscreen. Show some emotion, girl, before Martha shuts you off!

Contact ALL correspondent Robert Taylor at [email protected].