In June, I called Betty White vehicle Hot in Cleveland “a criminal waste of talent and potential.”
The summer confection (Wednesdays, 10:00 PM ET, TV Land, DISH 106) has now ended its first season, and I have revisited my verdict. Which is: It’s a criminal waste of talent and potential. But it’s getting better.
Criminal or not, Hot In Cleveland has done well enough to earn itself a second season. How’d this happen? It does just enough things right:
1) Wise limited deployment of Betty White: Perhaps due to her age, perhaps due to the rare smart decision by writers and creators, White isn’t ladled over the series like thick goulash. A little bit of Sophia Petrillo-lite goes a very long way, and some one has wised up to this. White wanders through a scene every now and then to deliver a set-down, and storylines which focus on her character are limited. That keeps her involvement fresh and a loyal audience wanting more.
For example, a highly predictable a episode involving a high school play included White sitting in the audience. As the lights went down, a fanfare sounded, and White cheerfully turned to her castmates and said with great cheerfulness, “I hate it already!” It was the best thing of the episode. It was quite possibly the best thing of the series. A lesser actress would have given a snarky, nasty read, but White’s ability to contrast tone with script gave an otherwise limp line a great deal of life.
2) Aiming for continuity: White’s character contains touches of her Golden Girls role, the dimwitted Rose Nylund. In Hot in Cleveland, White’s character is a sharpwitted Pole, turning the stereotype on its head. She does, however, introduce bits of cultural flavor, just as Rose did. These moments are sprinkled throughout each episode, making for a comfy eating-cheesecake-in-Miami feeling.
The finale brought together the threads of several different plotlines from the series’ inaugural season. Here’s another area in which producers learned their lesson from Golden Girls, one of television’s most infamously inconsistent sitcoms. Viewers now have DVR, DVD, and the memory of the entire Internet, and show creators are bowing to that fact.
Speaking of the finale, that brings me to what Hot In Cleveland should attend to as it prepares for a 2011 season:
1) Stop insulting 99.99% of your viewership: Speaking of the finale, this season’s last episode touched on an issue which reviewers have been hammering, and it’s involved with the premise itself: While the show may be construed as a slam at the superficiality of LA life, it often comes off as a thirty-minute hamfisted exploration of why anyone would actually choose to live in someplace like that awful Ohio. While this isn’t explicitly mentioned in the finale, the attitude rears its ugly, uninformed head throughout.
It has to do with the plot-centric tornado. I’m not turning to TV Land for a Weather Channel-grade primer on how tornadoes work. But… well… when characters are doing things like stepping out into a really windy day and mentioning “the eye of the storm”, we tend to wonder if the writers have gathered all their tornado-related information from Wizard of Oz. And, like a recent episode of Desperate Housewives, it looks like they pretty much have. It may seem like a quibble, but when much of the nation lives in tornado-prone areas, treating this seasonal fact of life like a freaking hurricane is a symptom of a prevailing arrogance.
2) “The terrorists have won,” seriously?: Poor Wendie Malick. Not only was her character awarded a line which was old a decade ago, she was also featured no-dimensional storyline featuring a faked disease which required her to–haha!–limp heavily and tote a goiter.
Please give these ladies the strong writing their talent deserves, OK? Then the terrorists will not, in fact, win.
