Monsters of Television

“I say we kill him and make his underage whore watch.”

Hot In Cleveland is fascinatingly bad, but it is bad.

There's a joke in here somewhere.

As I’ve made clear, I don’t think you can chalk up all the good or all the bad to a show’s format. Sure, the show is setting up jokes and knocking them down in very old-fashioned ways, but I don’t think this is really an issue (at least for me). The set-up/punchline structure isn’t a liability since everyone is an old pro at this (except Valerie Bertinelli, who seems to be channeling Miley Cyrus in her broad approach to comedy).

No, I think the problem is in the show’s ideology. The show is clearly pushing back against the LA/NYC binary of relationships, but the show’s characters are so age-conscious, gender-conscious, and class-conscious that it just feels like the show is pandering to its target demos instead of trying to be funny and do social commentary (or reverse the order, either way I’m fine).

Cleveland is the city, as one of the ladies notes, “Where all the men look like real men, and all the women look like real women.” I have no idea what that really means, but it sounds like, and I don’t like typing this, but it sounds like a Sarah Palin campaign speech from 2008 that’d deliver in the Midwest. Real men don’t live in NYC, and they definitely don’t live in LA (where, according to the show, sexual orientation has become questionable due to men’s grooming habits). Indeed, one of them even quip that a group of men at a dive bar are “adorably heterosexual” compared to the men they’re in LA. And the women, in their mid- to late-40s (if not older), are flabbergasted that they’re considered desirable in Cleveland.

And the age issue is a weird thing as well. Malick’s Victoria is a former soap diva, just cast as Megan Fox’s grandmother in the next Transformer movie (anyone want to break it to her that Fox isn’t in the next Transformer movie…?) is the worst of the bunch, horrendously worried and lying about her age, pleased whenever anyone thinks she’s younger than she is. Though, that part part goes for both Joy and Melanie.

Indeed, it’s Melanie who decides to stay in Cleveland after she sleeps with Hank (super hunky John Schneider in a super tight shirt), who happens to be married. Melanie’s motivation to stay in Cleveland is driven by seeing her (recently divorced) ex-husband on the flight to Paris with a trophy fiancée and her kids are away in college. Her decision, for whatever reason, motivates Victoria and Joy to stay as well.

Yes, they’re all in crisis mode (Joy recently lost Oprah as an eyebrow client), no doubt startled by their near-death plane crash. And perhaps staying in Cleveland will help them work through their issues. Victoria can work in regional/community theatre, rediscover her craft; Melanie can work for a local paper as an advice columnist; I have no idea what Joy will do in Cleveland. But that’s assuming they even work. Rich enough to fly off to Paris, it seems like they may not need to work to survive (or struggle to pay Betty White to be their live-in caretaker).

In the end, I’m not thrilled with the show’s depiction of these women as shallow and a bit short-sighted about their lives (is Joy shutting down her entire practice…?). Kind of like with The Big Bang Theory, the jokes for the audience aren’t the jokes, but the women themselves: they’re big city women stuck in the American Midwest, and, boy, are they clueless.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• I felt no need to mention Betty White because, well, she does her thing. One-liners and suggestive trailing off sentences. She’s good; everyone else…less so.
• I’ll probably have a review for next week as well, see how things play out beyond the pilot. So you can look forward to that if you were the 5 MILLION PEOPLE who tuned in for the premiere.