“Hot in Cleveland” returns to TV Land tonight, and along with the news about LeBron James, this gives Clevelanders two reasons to celebrate.
The sitcom about three L.A. friends who get stuck in the Rust Belt, then decide to stay after meeting Betty White — or maybe despite meeting Betty White — does what most sitcoms only dream of doing: make people laugh from the opening minute to the closing credits. It’s followed by a bird-of-a-feather comedy called “Happily Divorced,” which isn’t half the show “Hot in Cleveland” is, but that still makes it twice as funny as anything I watched from the big networks during their fall previews in May.Seriously, what is it about big-network comedy? Is it the relentless drive to feature actors in their 20s — the most uptight and least self-deprecating years of one’s adult life? The addiction to pop-culture references that no one will remember in five years? Or is it that all the good writers got fed up with chasing the 18- to 34-year-old demographic and moved over to cable?Those would all be good reasons why “Hot in Cleveland” earlier this year received the kind of order usually reserved for the big networks — 22 episodes, as many as the show’s first two seasons combined. The show is returning this week with new episodes from the still-in-progress second season.“Hot in Cleveland” has gotten an unfair reputation as being the Betty White show. Now, to be clear, I love Betty White, and if you haven’t seen the outtake from last season, please put this newspaper down — you are reading it as God intended, aren’t you? — and Google “Betty White Bender Over.” Now there’s something worth sending to 100 of your friends.But the truth is that “Hot in Cleveland” has all the things that are missing from many network comedies. First, you have talent with mileage. Yes, there’s Betty White, but you also get Jane Leeves, Valerie Bertinelli from “One Day at a Time” and the best supporting player in comedy today, Wendie Malick. Malick will go Amish in tonight’s episode, or rather her character — a veteran TV actress with a Norma Desmond complex — will. This comes after she finds herself in rural Ohio for a reason I can’t reveal except that, like everything else on the show, it made me laugh. So, this Amish woman finds out that Malick has had some work done on her in the hopes of interesting a casting director or two.Horrified, the woman says, “Don’t these casting directors recognize what God has made?” “Trust me,” Malick drolly replies, “in Hollywood God doesn’t recognize what he made.”Perfect.But here’s the show’s secret weapon: Their writers are allowed to use TV references earlier than 2011. TV Land is, after all, a retro channel. And it has been run very consistently, mostly by one man — Larry W. Jones — since Nick at Nite spun it off 15 years ago as a hipster vault for the likes of “Gunsmoke” and “That Girl.” Like most of us, Jones knows a classic line when he hears it 15 years later.And so, when George Wendt walks into the show tonight, if you know anything about George Wendt entrances, I guarantee that you will laugh.Whether you’ll laugh at “Happily Divorced,” I’m not going to guarantee. But I laughed here and there, which was surprising to me since I couldn’t stand “The Nanny,” the last sitcom to star Fran Drescher and her trademark sound. “The Nanny” was a hit back when CBS could slap almost anything on its Monday-night sitcom schedule and get 15 million viewers. Since then, however, Drescher has had a chance to show the world that comedy is truly a way to make sense of your troubles. First there was her 1996 memoir, “Enter Whining,” a mostly lighthearted account of her Hollywood mishaps and slow climb up the showbiz ladder — except for one brief passage in which Drescher admirably recounts a brutal 1985 home invasion and attack on herself and a female friend while her husband, Peter Marc Jacobson, was forced to watch. Then in 2000, Drescher was diagnosed with uterine cancer, but not before an almost comically long line of misdiagnoses (trust me, if you’ve been through the ordeal, you eventually see the humor). Her response was a book with the perfectly suited title “Cancer Schmancer.”At about that same time, her husband of 21 years revealed to her that he was gay. One must eventually see the humor in that, too, because the ex-couple have collaborated on “Happily Divorced,” in which Drescher plays Fran, a woman whose husband, Peter, comes out after 18 years of marriage. Peter is played by John Michael Higgins, a versatile if unremarkable comic actor I still remember as the guy who played David Letterman in the HBO movie version of Bill Carter’s book “The Late Shift.” Besides Drescher and Higgins, another familiar face, D.W. Moffett (“Switched at Birth,” “Friday Night Lights”), plays the new man in Fran’s life. And two actors with special places in my heart play Fran’s folks: Robert Walden, who played Joe Rossi on the greatest TV drama about newspaper journalism ever, and as far as I’m concerned the the only one, “Lou Grant”; and Rita Moreno, who for all her achievements on stage and screen will forever be the lady who yelled “Hey you guyyyys!” on “The Electric Company.”The writing doesn’t really rise to the level of all this talent, but that may just be first-episode jitters. Then again, Fran and Peter may not have changed as much as they think they have since they worked on “The Nanny.” We’ll see if the audience cares.TONIGHT ON TV LAND“Hot in Cleveland” airs at 9 p.m. and “Happily Divorced follows at 9:30 p.m.
