The Amish are hot! Well, on TV. We've had reality shows "Breaking Amish" and "Amish Mafia." And now a (more?) fictionalized version of that (once?) insular part of American culture is presented in not awful/not great "An Amish Murder" (9 tonight, Lifetime), starring Neve Campbell.

Campbell plays Kate, the chief of police in small-town Ohio who, under mysterious circumstances, left the Amish community she now polices. For the most part, her job involves herding loose cows off the road, but one day, a body is found. An Amish girl is dead and the evidence points to a serial killer who terrorized the community years before.

The case brings pressure on Kate, who is new to the job, and pulls her back into the orbit of the family and community that now shuns her. That includes her brother Jacob (played by Christian Campbell, Neve's real-life brother) and Lucas (Jilon Vanover) the man she would have married and whom she abandoned without a word (because of the mysterious circumstances).

Wacky family comedies (with heart) have been pretty good to ABC, which means someone at NBC said 'Get me one of those!'

So here comes "1600 Penn" (9:30 tonight NBC), a sitcom with potential about the First Family, if the First Family was allowed to be like the rest of us. (Tonight is a sneak peek; the show officially premieres on Jan. 10.)

I don't want to give away too much but we've seen elements of this First Family on the national stage. President Gilchrist (Bill Pullman) is a hapless, uptight dad; First Lady Emily (Jenna Elfman) is his hot wife trying desperately to connect with her step children. Son Skip (Josh Gad) is a chubby, lovable screw-up with 7 years of college under his belt; Becca (Martha MacIsaac) is the perfect daughter who quickly reveals a big mistake.

The issues of race and identity are explored in the fifth edition of Soledad O'Brien's reports on African-American life. "Who Is Black in America?" (8 tonight, CNN) looks at colorism, the act of judging someone based on their skin tone in a world where 15 percent of new marriages are interracial, and one in seven babies in America are mixed race, according to the 2010 Census.

You may have also noticed we have a mixed race president.

Or do we have a black president? That's the kind of trickiness O'Brien navigates in "Who Is Black in America?" She focuses on a Philadelphia-based spoken word group made up of teens and lead by Perry "Vision" DiVirgillio, who has a one black and one white parent and identifies as black. There is one teen in the group with a white father and a black mother; she grew up with her father and although she has the outward appearance of someone most would consider black, she identifies as white. Another young woman is from Egypt; despite the lighter skin and finer hair of a Northern African, she identifies as black.

"Christmas With Holly," (Sunday, 9 p.m. ABC) is cute. Really cute. Relentlessly cute. So cute it makes you go numb.

It's the cute story of Maggie (Eloise Mumford) who, after getting left at the altar in Seattle, decides to go for her plan B: opening a toy store in Friday Harbor, an island off Washington State, with a super-cute Main St., where she spent her summers.

She meets Mark (Sean Faris), the part-owner of a local coffee shop who has become the legal guardian of his 6-year-old niece Holly (twins Lucy & Josie Gallina share the role) after her mother/his sister died. Holly, so sad about her loss, has stopped speaking. So Mark brings her back home to Friday Harbor and her two cute uncles (Daniel Eric Gold, Dana Watkins) from Seattle. On the same day, on the same ferry Maggie is on. Naturally, they meet cute; just to up the cuteness, there's a dog involved.

If you've ever picked up a Vogue magazine, you've seen the beautiful, sometimes magical, fashion spreads. They aren't just pretty pictures with pretty women in pretty clothes. They're telling a story.

"In Vogue: The Editor's Eye" (9 tonight, HBO) introduces us to the storytellers, the fashion editors who conceive the stories and then find just the right photographers and models and moments to bring them to life on the magazine's pages. It's a documentary full of stories, fun characters, and of course, gorgeous images, although at an hour long with several stories to tell you might be left wanting.
 

BET gets a lot of flack for the programming it airs. Some folks think the network wastes its valuable airwaves with muck that demeans and distorts.

Well, "Vindicated" (10:30 p.m. tonight BET) has content about as serious and important as it comes. It's a outrage-inducing and heart-breaking docu-series about folks falsely imprisoned, and an examination of the injustices that don't receive nearly enough coverage.

Hosted/narrated (and executive produced) by actor Morris Chestnut, "Vindicated" follows the format of other stripped-from-the-headlines reality crime shows; using court records and news accounts, as well as first-person accounts from family, friends, legal types and journalists, it re-enacts the life of the 'vindicated' person and explains how he landed in prison, and then got out.

As I recall Elizabeth Taylor hated being called 'Liz.'

But I bet she didn't hate that as much as she'd hate "Liz & Dick" (9 p.m. Sunday, Lifetime), the TV movie about her love affair with Richard Burton, starring Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler.  

It's not exactly disrespectful using the nickname the actress hated so much. The film makes a big deal about the fact that the couple helped herald the era of stars being hounded by paparazzi with their scandalous affair, and in tabloid culture they were 'Liz & Dick.' (Combining their names a la Brangelina would have been far worse. Try it.)

Yet that paparazzi-bait note is pretty much all the movie has to hang its hat on. It's all shallow replications of Elizabeth Taylor outfits and hairstyles, and Taylor/Burton fights and meltdowns without much insight or energy.

It's always nice to be pleasantly surprised and that happened as I screened "Wedding Band," (10 p.m. Saturday, TBS), an hourlong comedy about yes, a wedding band.

I wasn't expecting much because TBS' slogan 'very funny' has often been overstatement, if not an outright lie. And while "Wedding Band" isn't flat-out hilarious, I was smiling at the end of the feel-good pilot. Its portrayal of four male friends is closer in sensibility to "Men Of A Certain Age" than TBS' own "Men at Work."

Malibu Country
8:30 p.m. on ABC

Disclosure: I need to tell you right up front that I have never been what you'd call a fan of Reba McEntire, and I didn't care at all for her "Reba" series, which ran for six whole seasons on The WB/The CW. So while I'm obviously not predisposed to loving her new series, "Malibu Country" (which premieres tonight on ABC after Tim Allen's "Last Man Standing" and which sounds an awful lot like that old "Reba" series!), I've done my best to be objective about it.

In "Malibu Country," Reba plays Reba MacKenzie, wife of a "lyin', cheatin'" country music mega-star, whom she dumps in the middle of a live press conference while he's trying to make amends to his fans for his latest affair.

Comic DL Hughley is clearly a funny guy. Smart too. Yet when he tries to put his talent in a a vehicle other than standup, it never quite comes together. Remember his wildly uneven CNN show, "DL Hughley Breaks the News"?

Which brings us to "DL Hughley: The Endangered List" (11 tonight, Comedy Central), his one-hour "social experiment" or satirical documentary about the comic's quest to get the black man on the endangered species list. Once again, there are moments of sharp observation, humor, even poignancy. But it, too, is more parts than the sum of those parts, a great idea that doesn't quite come together.