Forward, Into the Past

HOT IN CLEVELAND, TV Land, Wednesdays, 10 p.m./9 p.m. CT, HAPPILY DIVORCED, TV Land, Wednesdays, 10:30 p.m./9:30 p.m. CT

You have to hand it to TV Land. For all of its relatively brief life, the channel has lived off repeats of series from our dim and recent past, from The Andy Griffith Show to Everybody Loves Raymond. Watching the network felt like a trip to your parents' house. Everything was old and familiar. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Stepping back into the past can be a nice escape from reality for a bit. Still, at some point, you want to get back to the iPhone age.

So what's a nostalgia-based network to do? Come up with these two sit-coms, which performing the nifty and seldom-scene trick of being both current and retro at the same time. They're 30-minute time machines, where everything new is old again. Familiar TV faces, like Fran Drescher and Valerie Bertinelli, take you on a guided tour through jokes that could have been (and probably were) written several decades ago, stuck in a freezer for safe-keeping and then released to thaw out for an audience of midlifers that was pining for the simple, family shows it grew up with.

CATCHING PUNCH LINES

Cleveland and Divorced start with the sort of concepts that you can grasp in the time it takes you to turn on the remote control. The former, returning for a second season, is about three Hollywood types (Bertinelli, Wendie Malick, Jane Leeves) who decide to escape the selfishness of show business and settle in Cleveland. The latter (which just premiered), based on Drescher's real life, is about….well, let these final four lines from the theme song (and yes, the show is so retro, it even has a theme song) tell you. "She got married anyway, turns out that he was gay, they're still in love but now she's happily divorced."

And, just like the old days of TV, that's pretty much it. The three-mismatched friends and their elderly, snarky friend (Betty White) get themselves into and out of wacky situations every week. A very loud divorced woman regularly explains to her parents and strangers that her ex-husband (John Michael Higgins) is gay but it's okay that he still lives with her. Whatever passes for plot is really only there to provide the actors to volley punch lines back and forth.

And those gags? They're the sort that I like to think of as a game. Hear the set-up, then guess what the punch line is going to be. Let's try it now. The Cleveland women end up in an Amish country hangout, and are told the men wear beards to "tell single women to stay away." How would Leeves respond? If you said, "They're working," you win. How about when Drescher's parents tell her to woo her ex back by going to a lingerie store and purchasing something sexy? If you have her retort as, "Like what? A jock strap?", score one for your team.

HIP? NO. HOT? YES.

Now I know it seems like I'm being just as sarcastic with this commentary as the characters are with their dialogue. And sure, I enjoy the occasional hip and inventive show, neither of which either of these shows will ever be. The thing is, though, I have to admire them because they don't try to be anything other than what they are. In this day and age, where few television comedies are shot in front of live human beings, there's something that's cheesily charming about hearing an audience hoot when Higgins asks Drescher where he should move to and she bellows, "You're gay! Go to the YMCA!"

This explains the phenomenon that these two shows have become – they are throwbacks to a time that, buried somewhere deep in our hearts, we still have a soft spot for. Barely a critic alive, or at least any of them under the age of 50, have said anything nice about Cleveland and Divorced. Meanwhile, the public doesn't care, with both of them proving to be major ratings grabbers for TV Land.

Certainly these are not shows that you'll remember by the time you go to bed, but I have to admit I admire how they don't really care. The goal is simply to create TV Twinkies – easily digestible treats that do you no good whatsoever. They taste familiar and besides, they remind you of what you used to love when you were younger. There's no harm in that. I'm actually kind of jealous….I wouldn't mind at all if my old jokes suddenly made me popular simply because they were old.  

For more shows you should be watching, check out:

Covert Affairs, The Glades, Leverage

Franklin & Bash

Piers Morgan Tonight, The Rachel Maddow Show, Hannity

Treme

The Bachelorette, Pawn Stars, America's Got Talent

Men Of A Certain Age

Conan, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, The Late Show With David Letterman

Happy Endings

Saturday Night Live

Glee, The Big Bang Theory, The Mentalist

In Plain Sight