'Hot in Cleveland' Premiere

Hot in Cleveland is the perfect show for TV Land because it feels like an insta-rerun, a show created in a style so dated that, a few cultural references aside, it could come right out of another decade. The comedy about three middle-aged Los Angeles women who find new purpose in the Midwest is inoffensive and sometimes mildly amusing, but also bland and completely forgettable.

For its first effort at an original scripted series, TV Land has apparently done everything possible to replicate the feel of watching a rerun from a decade or two ago, so as not to upset the nostalgia-focused channel’s delicate balance. Thus Hot in Cleveland, aside from a few modern references to people like Megan Fox and LeBron James, could easily pass for a short-lived sitcom canceled after one season in 1991. Partly this means that it relies on some durable old devices, including the close bond among three female friends, the fish-out-of-water feel of moving to a new city and the incongruously salty old lady. But mostly it means that it feels stale before it even gets going.

It does help that old pros Valerie Bertinelli, Wendie Malick and Jane Leeves, who have decades of sitcom experience among them, play the show’s main characters, three middle-aged friends from L.A. who are passing their career and relationship primes and need a new start. They basically get one character trait each, but they play it well, and can deliver lame jokes with enough enthusiasm to almost make them entertaining. The show’s not-so-secret weapon is current pop-culture phenomenon Betty White, who plays the caretaker of the house in Cleveland where the three friends take up residence. White’s dialogue isn’t really any better than the rest of the characters’, but she has a delightfully offhand way of delivering lines, and she isn’t burdened with the responsibility of character development, so all she has to do is show up and say something funny, at which she mostly succeeds.

Although the premise of the show is that these glamorous women, considered over the hill in L.A., get the attention they deserve in the more down-to-earth environment of Cleveland, it doesn’t do much with the setting. We’re solidly in sitcom-land, no matter what city is in the title. The edges are rounded off, the jokes are pre-digested, and everything is as bland as possible. It’s a perfect time-filler between episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond.

Disclosure: A review screener was provided by the network. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.