"Alaska: I love this state like I love my family."

So Sarah Palin begins "Sarah Palin's Alaska," an eight-week look at the Last Frontier with your hosts, the Palins. Whether or not Sarah Palin's Alaska looks anything like Maia Nolan's Alaska remains to be seen, but I have to imagine there are things about growing up in the Palin house in Wasilla that can't have been too different from having grown up in the Nolan house in Anchorage.

We open on the Palin family kitchen, where 9-year-old Piper and her cousin McKinley are baking cupcakes with Sarah's help. In standard reality-show format, we cut back and forth between the kitchen scene and an on-camera interview in which Sarah tells us how Piper has "been my sidekick since the day she was born."

Piper looks up from the cupcakes she's baking and, cool as a cucumber, calls out, "What else, Sarah?"

Her mother (who looks a lot more put together in the kitchen than my mother ever did, but on the other hand, my mother never had a TV series filming in the kitchen) stops what she's doing, straightens up, raises one eyebrow and repeats, archly: "What else?" She uses the tone of voice you might imagine she'd use with one of the people who suggested she stay home and raise her children instead of hitting the campaign trail in 2008.

Next we go to the back patio, where Sarah is working on her writing (and drinking out of a Skinny Raven Sports coffee cup). Todd comes out to check on her, and talk turns immediately to summer neighbor Joe McGinniss, who famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) rented the house next door to the Palins while working on his forthcoming book about Sarah, which promises to be anything but flattering. I'll admit I sympathize a bit here with Sarah -- if someone were writing a book that promised to be critical of me, I'd be uncomfortable if they moved in next door to me. This may be one area, though, in which TLC has a hard time defending its insistence that the show is not supposed to be political -- especially when Sarah talks about how the 14-foot fence Todd and his buddies built to protect the family's privacy could be a "good example" of what we need to do to "secure our nation's border." I'm not sure she's right, though -- I mean, why hurt our Canadian neighbors' feelings by building a 14-foot fence between us and them?

A ‘taxi' to bear country

After the McGinniss interlude, Todd, Sarah, Piper and McKinley pile into a Rust's Flying Service float plane while Sarah talks about how "the local taxi for us is a Bush plane, usually -- that's how you get around in Alaska." I'm worried Outside viewers might be confused by this. Rest assured, friends, in Maia Nolan's Alaska, a taxi is a taxi. Big River Lake, where Sarah, Todd and the girls are going, though, is definitely off the road system -- just across Cook Inlet, off toward Lake Clark.

Footage of the flight is interspersed with an interview with Piper in which she talks about her mother being "super busy" and "addicted to the BlackBerry." She does a little imitation of Sarah texting with two thumbs.