CYNDI LAUPER: STILL SO UNUSUAL

This seems pretty unusual: In a reality series about a pop diva, the most memorable scene in the fi rst two episodes is a teaching moment where the celebrity mom meekly accepts that she’s embarrassed her 14-year-old son.

Cyndi Lauper, the ’80s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” star, still has an active singing career, including a May 2012 appearance on The Voice that’s dealt with in the first episode of this new docuseries. She wrote the music for an upcoming Broadway show, Kinky Boots. She’s written a new autobiography.

She’s also a mom, whose actor husband (David Thornton) has put his career on hold to stay at home.

It’s an established docuseries formula, and works here because, despite all that activity, Lauper is pretty easygoing most of the time.

Thornton (you’d know him if you saw his face) is funny and deferential. Their family life is not too much different than most. Other than mom’s fame and busy schedule. Oh, and the time she accidentally dropped an F-bomb on live TV during a parade at the Kentucky Derby, and the YouTube video racked up 100,000 instant views.

“You swear at home, you swear at work, you swear to your employees — and now it bit you in the ass because you swore at a wrong time,” Declyn gets to lecture mom in the limo later.

When the same Declyn later flirts with a girl in the stands at the Derby, Lauper bears that patiently, too.

Cameos from Kathy Griffin and Fred Willard (“I understand you were working with some [effing] idiot yesterday”) keep the smiles coming, and there’s just enough drama to keep you interested.

Kent Gibbons

Kent has been a journalist, writer and editor at Multichannel News since 1994 and with Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He is a good point of contact for anything editorial at the publications and for Nexttv.com. Before joining Multichannel News he had been a newspaper reporter with publications including The Washington Times, The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal and North County News.