Leonard takes family, viewers on a wild, enjoyable 'Ride'

"My wife thought it was the craziest idea she'd ever heard," Mike Leonard says of the concept for what turned out to be his documentary miniseries "The Ride of Our Lives." And Your Friendly Neighborhood TV Critic has to admit, it's right up there, even if the craziest idea for a TV show this season still has to be CBS' swiftly canceled musical drama "Viva Laughlin."

Leonard might have done a lot of nutty things and covered a lot of wacky people as the Winnetka-based correspondent for NBC's "Today Show," but to his credit he's never asked Melanie Griffith to sing on camera.

That said, the idea for "The Ride of Our Lives" was and is pretty daft. With one daughter about to give birth here in the Chicago area and his wife staying home to tend to her, Leonard packed up his three other adult children and a daughter-in-law, loaded them into a mobile home and drove off to Arizona, where they added another, larger mobile home to the caravan along with his two parents, both in their 80s, in order "to pick up and go with no real set plan" -- except to keep the camera rolling, of course.

The resulting 12-part PBS series debuts at 8 p.m. today on WTTW Channel 11, and before the first half-hour segment is over Leonard himself is wondering aloud, "Why did I do this? Why? … I'll be locked up when this month is over."

Leonard, however, is a natural-born TV features reporter and an adept visual storyteller. Yes, he can be a little willfully daffy -- driving his kids crazy with his incessant picking at a "lapsichord" training device he's using to help himself learn the banjo, even as he drives one-handed down the highway -- but he also has a wry sense of humor and an openness to the stories of others, the product of a uniquely American, Whitmanesque outlook in which his sees his life reflected in others' and vice versa.

"This is our story," he says at the outset, "but it's everybody's story."

In that, I believe he's referring to the arc of life, and as uncontrived as he claims to be he also seems hyper-aware of those larger themes: his parents on perhaps their last great adventure, his daughter at home about to give birth to literally the next generation in the form of their first great-grandchild and Leonard firmly if nomadically entrenched in middle age in between.

At a public preview here in Chicago last week, Leonard insisted, "We took a risk with this. This is not a financial windfall for any of us." Still, the potential for a windfall is there, as the trip has already produced the PBS series and an accompanying best-selling book, with the movie rights bought by Disney.

That said, this is admittedly a risky concept on many fronts, and that point is driven home by his pregnant daughter, Megan, when she looks into the camera and says, "If they aren't home when I have this baby, I'm going to … kill someone -- namely my father."

The thing about willful eccentrics is they're charming only up to the point where they begin to intrude on others' lives and get irritating. So the balancing act isn't just whether Leonard can pull off this trip and get everyone back in time for the birth -- which appears to constitute much of the drama in the later episodes -- but whether he can keep a viewer entranced along the way.

That he appears to do, at least from what I've seen of "The Ride of Our Lives." In tonight's premiere, just when you're beginning to think that 12 weeks with this family might be too much to endure, Leonard delivers a wonderful story about how he got into TV. He was working construction, with no real long-term prospects, squirreling away money for an engagement ring, when his parents revealed they had such a ring as an heirloom. Leonard had to return to college within days, but in the era before express mail his father took the ring to the airport, gave it to a stewardess en route to Chicago and he picked it up at the gate.

Leonard took the money he'd saved and bought a movie camera. After a number of false starts at other careers, the whimsical visual storytelling he developed eventually brought him to the attention of "Today." The rest is history.

And I'm prepared to say that little bit of kismet was blessed not just for Leonard and his family, but for viewers as well. The benefits for all are on ample display in "The Ride of Our Lives."

In the air

Remotely interesting: "The Celebrity Apprentice" holds its two-hour live finale at 8 p.m. today on NBC's WMAQ Channel 5. … Today's NCAA men's basketball games are Washington State-North Carolina at 6:27 p.m. on WBBM Channel 2, followed by Louisville-Tennessee at 8:57 p.m.

The producers of "American Idol" are coming to town to audition young hotties for an as-yet-undetermined reality show involving actors or models -- or both. They're looking to avoid creating a zoo scene, so details are being kept secret, but if you think you're attractive or talented -- or both -- and are between 19 and 25 years old, send a photo, your name, age, city and state and contact information to 19search@gmail.com.

End of the dial: Zemira Jones, former head of the Disney-owned radio stations here in town, has left his post as vice president of operations at Radio One.

Arbitron is scheduled to release its monthly trends report for Chicago on Monday.