Sarah Palin's Alaska: Good Branding, Bad TV

Sarah Palin seems to be out for a fresh start with her new reality show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska. “In this well-staged reboot, the less you know about her—or, in some cases, shuddered to think about her—then the better the show gets, writes Hank Stuever of the Washington Post. Then it’s just a weird outdoors show, about a busy mom with a bunch of kids and a Fox News TV studio in her driveway.

The show does manage to make Palin “about a thousand times more relatable and likable than any previous effort, which is, after all, the goal.” This is just about branding, reinforcing Palin’s “brave frontier woman” persona—even if she looks like she’s “counting the seconds until she’s back at the truck and has enough signal bars to tweet about how pretty the sky is.” But ultimately, “it's still pretty blah and rarely rises above a relative's chatty slide show of vacation pictures.” (More Sarah Palin's Alaska stories.)