Warning: This column contains views contrary to those commonly expressed about an allegedly adorable 88-year-old actress and her new sitcom.
That Betty White woman sure has a good publicist. And a happy, top-notch agent.
A great many strange events have unfolded this year, but few as odd and perplexing as the amount of attention paid to White. A TV veteran, she is known for a supporting role on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and as one of the leads on Golden Girls. Now White - or, surely, her gifted publicist and hard-working agent - have parlayed perfunctory affection for the old dear into a dazzling return to the limelight.
Betty White's bizarre new stardom is an entirely PR-driven phenomenon. Out of nowhere there appeared an Internet push to have her host Saturday Night Live. She did, eventually. Who's going to sneer at an 88-year-old little lady with a lot of friends in the showbiz racket? (Well, I would, and will, but I'm not an American showbiz-writer flibberjibbet or a wannabe.) That SNL drew a lot of viewers one Saturday night in May. In the U.S., that is. Here it aired during a red-hot Stanley Cup playoff series. If you watched SNL instead of hockey, you were part of a tiny minority.
The gist of the phenomenon is this: She's old, she's cute and she can deliver funny lines, just like she's been delivering them for about 60 years. She's got one look, one acting style and she's stuck with it. Hurrah for her. People, you must never, ever underestimate the American appetite for mawkish sentimentality about the aged. Or underestimate showbiz insincerity and the power of relentless promotion. A lot of people have gotten very rich from trite sentimentality. And Betty White - along with her brilliant publicist - is old enough to know every such trick in the showbiz racket.
Hot In Cleveland (CTV, 8 p.m.) is the upshot of the Betty White boondoggle. A sitcom made for the cable channel TV Land, it has generated tons of coverage in the U.S. because well, praising a sassy old showbiz broad is usually a safe bet. And it's the summertime, so there's not much competing fare.
Thing is, the show is unspeakably awful. It is mind-numbingly, grotesquely dumb and, worse, it seeks to demonize all women over the age of 30 as bitter, ceaselessly self-conscious about their age and looks, and moronically inclined to fall for any man who compliments them on their looks. This is all thought to be hilariously funny, too. The jarringly incessant laugh track tells you that.
The show, such as it is, chronicles the comic adventures of Melanie (Valerie Bertinelli, age 50), Joy (Jane Leeves, age 49), and Victoria (Wendie Malick, age 59), who are flying to Paris from Los Angeles when they are obliged to land in Cleveland. After ten minutes in a Cleveland bar where men look at them with interest, at least one decides to stay in the city. They rent a house and caretaker Elka (White) comes with it. One thing leads to another - though not really, because nothing happens - and they're in Cleveland whiling away the days listening to the gnomic wisecracks of Elka on matters related to being old.
It's not even an authentic sitcom, in truth. It's driven by showbiz insider humour. A viewer is supposed to know that Bertinelli is best known for the sitcom One Day At A Time, that Leeves is best known for being Daphne on Frasier and Mallick is known her being an acid-tongued man-eater on the sitcom Just Shoot Me. They are all sitcom vets, past it, and they sit around delivering set-up lines to White, the ultimate sitcom veteran, who then delivers the punchlines.
There is yet another insider, retro-TV joke in the character who sets one lady's heart aflutter in Cleveland - he's played by John Schneider, aged 50, who was a star of The Dukes of Hazzard. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.
This is an ersatz sitcom. There is nothing even remotely human about it. It's a contrivance built to take advantage of a burst of publicity for Betty White. As such, there is something fascinating about it - how something so bogus and inane was made and aired is a puzzle. One that Betty White's publicist can answer, laughing all the way to the bank.