So, I Watched Hot in Cleveland

Image from News TV Online

While surfing the internets this Saturday night, I switched on the tube (can we still call flat panels "the tube?"), which was still set to TVLand, where I was watching Roseanne the night before.  That bit with Dan and the spoiled milk still kills me. Anyway, I happened to tune in at the first episode of Hot in Cleveland, which turned out to be playing a marathon. I decided to leave it there.

I only half-watched the first episode, but the premise is apparently that three slightly-past middle aged women were flying to Paris from Los Angeles, and had a forced landing in Cleveland, Ohio. . .where they decided to stay.  Shaky, right?  And the house they rent comes with a "caretaker," the suddenly hot again Betty White.  Jane Leeves (Frasier) plays a former beautician to the stars, Wendie Malick (Just Shoot Me) plays a Susan Lucci-like star of a just cancelled soap opera, and Valerie Bertinelli is an author of a best-selling fad book. They're all single, and on the prowl (insert cougar joke here).  Betty White supplies the ribald little-old-lady humor.

The show is stock sitcom, and at first feels quite forced, and just barely funny.  As the series progresses, it does get better, as you get to know the characters, and the chemistry starts to gel.  I'm several episodes in (right now the one with Bertinelli's son is on), and it still isn't great, but it is good.  The laugh track (which we are assured is at least in part a "live studio audience") is annoying, as it can be on many sitcoms, especially if you're not giving it your full attention.  But every member of the cast is a sitcom pro, and that shines through, lifting what could be mediocre material.

Most sitcoms go through a flat period in their first seasons.  The Big Bang Theory took half a season to really click for me.  The funny thing is, after you become enamored with a show like that, you can rewatch the early episodes and enjoy them more for knowing the characters better.  Maybe Hot in Cleveland, if it goes on for several more seasons, will be like that. 

One thing the show will remind you of--and not just for the presence of Betty White--is The Golden Girls.  It has the three older women with the wiseacre really older woman, largely set in a house, often in the kitchen.  But it's also a subversion of the older show.  Bertinelli and Leeves are pushing 50, and Malick is nearly 60.  But these ladies look nothing like the retirees on The Golden Girls. 

There was a time when women in their forties and fifties looked old.  That's not intended to be insulting. When I was a kid in the 70s, one of my grandmas was in her late 40s, and one was in her mid-50s.  They wore old lady clothes, they wore old lady glasses, and they had old lady hairdos.  It seemed almost all women in their age bracket did the same.  Then in the 80s, women started to push that trend aside. Remember Linda Evans (Dynasty) saying "forty isn't fatal?"  And her co-star, Joan Collins, was in her 50s, and posing naked for Playboy!  They didn't look like old ladies, but they still looked older.

In Hot in Cleveland, Leeves and especially Bertinelli could easily pass for early 40s--and very good early 40s at that.  Malick, who I've enjoyed in every role I've seen her in, wouldn't be pegged any higher than very early 50s.  These ladies really look terrific, and the storylines--while playfully playing with the aging issue--are nowhere near the "retirees" vibe of The Golden Girls.  And 25 years after that older show began, here's Betty White, still going strong.

I'm not sure I'll make Hot in Cleveland a regular viewing habit. But if I land on TVLand and it's on, I'll watch.  If season two continues the improvements made along the first's run, it may get a regular spot on my DVR.