• Lock 'N Load, 8-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Showtime

• Latino in America, 9-11 p.m. Wednesday, CNN

Bill and Betty Garcia moved from New York City to Charlotte, N.C., so their sons could grow up away from the grind and grime of urban life. Now they think they made a mistake: ``The boys might have lost a vital connection to their Latino roots.'' So the Garcias take the kids back to New York once a year to reestablish their ethnicity, which, according to their parents, they do by playing basketball (which was invented in Kansas) and listening to hip-hop music (which was invented by Jamaican immigrants in New York City).

The Garcias' puzzling definition of ``Latin roots'' is just one small part of CNN's massive Latino in America, a sprawling four-hour documentary that debuts Wednesday. (The second two-hour episode airs Thursday.) But it encapsulates the confusion and indirection of a program that is often interesting, sometimes heartbreaking, occasionally charming and frequently irritating.

A group portrait of 47 million Americans, ranging from undocumented Guatemalan sweatshop workers in Los Angeles to millionaire Cuban bankers in Miami, is inevitably going to have some blurry lines. But Latino in America seems peculiarly and, at times, willfully unfocused.

Following links that often are tenuous -- the Miami segment, for instance, is introduced with the story of a Guatemalan teenager whose only connection to the city is that she was locked up in an immigration detention center after being caught illegally crossing the Rio Grande -- Latino in America skips through socioeconomic time and space with little pause for contemplation.

Even so fundamental a question as what, exactly, a Latino is goes unasked, much less answered. Mexican-American immigration activists interviewed in Arizona seem to feel Latinos are an indigenous race whose rights supersede national boundaries. But Bill and Betty Garcia (he was born in Puerto Rico, she in the Dominican Republic) treat Latino as a nationality. Mourns Betty of her sons: ``They say, `My parents are Latinos.' They feel they're Americans.''

To the extent that Latino in America does define its subjects, it does so through the caricatures of a 1955 sociology textbook. Almost everybody in the documentary is either poor and troubled -- single chicana moms in Los Angeles, jobless Puerto Ricans in Orlando, suicidal Dominican girls in New York -- or works for the government. The major exceptions are a handful of entertainment figures like Eva Longoria and George Lopez.

Doctors? Lawyers? Arte Moreno, the Mexican-American owner of the Los Angeles Angels? The Unanue family, the millionaire Puerto Ricans who own Goya Foods? Cuban-American real estate mogul Jorge Perez? All mysteriously absent. Consciously or not, the message of Latino in America is that to make money in the United States, a Latino must either live off government patronage or learn to sing and dance. (It's possible this deficiency may be partly addressed in portions of a segment on Miami that CNN didn't include in advance screening copies of the documentary because of last-minute production changes.)

For all these criticisms, Latino in America is often engaging, especially as it focuses on the age-old generational tensions triggered by immigrant assimilation. These can be amusing, as when Bill and Betty Garcia's kids confide that they hate rice and beans. (``I don't like Spanish food,'' says one of the boys, his voice thick with disgust. ``I eat fried chicken and stuff.'') Other times they are painful. The high rate of suicide attempts by teenage Latinas caught between their parents' rigid definition of femininity and the independent lifestyle of American girls is frightening.

`LOCK 'N LOAD'

Another large American subculture -- the tens of millions of U.S. gun owners -- also gets some exposure Wednesday when Showtime's new reality series Lock 'N Load debuts. It follows the daily life of Josh T. Logan, a salesman (``gunslinger,'' he likes to call himself) in a family-owned Colorado gun shop, as he schmoozes customers while trying to sell them AK-47s, 9mm Glocks and other household gunpowder appliances.

Watching Logan hand small children assault rifles for inspection will no doubt amuse gun nuts and enrage anti-gun nuts. And both camps are likely to blink at one of the (surprisingly numerous) female customers who -- jokingly asked if she's carrying a weapon -- whips out three concealed knives.

``Are you going to have to use this on anyone?'' says Logan as he fingers one of the giant blades. Nah, the woman shakes her head, nodding toward her husband: ``He's fixed.''