Hot in Cleveland is old school
There are times on the set of TV’S Hot in Cleveland when it’s easy to get distracted.

Having a who’s-who of comedy legends sitting around discussing their past tends to make concentrating on the task at hand a bit tough, admits star Jane Leeves. The actor is a longtime TV favourite herself, most notably for her 11-year run on Frasier. But she seems positively green when compared to some of the show’s guest stars.

Cleveland’s biggest attraction, of course, is TV mainstay and newly hip 90-year-old Betty White. But she isn’t the only representative from comedy’s golden age.

An upcoming episode, for instance, finds Ed Asner dropping by. Another Season 3 outing had Don Rickles, Buck Henry and Carl Reiner showing up on set, armed with remarkable showbiz tales that stretched back to the Second World War.

“We all sit on the set and listen to wonderful stories that they have,” says Leeves, in an interview from her home in Los Angeles. “I remember Carl telling us a story about how Betty’s husband saved his life. He said he was just about to be shipped out to Iwo Jima and Allen Ludden, who was in charge of entertaining the troops, said, ‘No, I want this guy to come entertain the troops.’ So he pulls him out at the last minute. It’s just an incredible story. So we just sort of sit there and drink it all in.”

Presumably not all of the stories are filled with this sort of life-or-death gravitas. But it’s appropriate that Hot in Cleveland, which has just been picked up for a fourth season in the U.S., has had a parade of oldschool comedy types march through its ranks. The sitcom became a surprise hit in 2010 for U.S. cable network TV Land, which was originally founded to air reruns.

With its tale of three “past-their-prime” Hollywood women decamping to Cleveland, the show boasts that familiar TV theme of fish out of water.

In fact, it seems to hearken back to an older template of sitcom: there’s the high-concept premise; the recognizable TV faces of Leeves, Wendie Malick (Just Shoot Me) and Valerie Bertinelli (One Day at a Time); the sassy old-timer (White). It’s the sort of sitcom that operates as if gamechangers such as Seinfeld and The Simpsons never existed.

“These things are cyclical,” Leeves says. “I remember when we started Frasier, they said the hourlong drama was dead. The following year, ER came on the scene and that changed that. The half-hour, four-camera sitcom was supposed to be dead. When we started this, I said: ‘You watch, once the show’s a success, the networks will start doing four-camera, half-hours again.’ And they have. I think there’s something women-friendly about them and, generally speaking, it’s something that the entire family can sit down and watch together. Which, in the current climate, you don’t always get.”

Canadian viewers are only in Season 2 (U.S. viewers are midway through Season 3 on TV Land) of watching Leeves play Joy, a beautician and former “Eyebrow Queen of Beverly Hills” who deals with middle-aged romance and dwindling job prospects with her two similarly aged friends and elderly landlady. The British-born actress’s tenure in television dates back to her “Hill’s Angels” days on the Benny Hill Show, which she followed with a run of guest shots on sitcoms such as Murphy Brown and Who’s the Boss?

She arguably played her own small role in unravelling the rules of TV comedy as easily offended virgin Marla Penny in four episodes of Seinfeld, the ultimate anti-sitcom sitcom.

But, up until Hot in Cleveland, she was best known as eccentric physical therapist Daphne Moon on Frasier.

All of this TV experience has given her some insight into what makes a sitcom work.

“The chemistry between the cast always makes for a great show,” Leeves says. “It’s palpable. People feel the good energy from the screen. . . . It’s lightning in a bottle. It’s so rare. You sit down at a table-read and you feel that chemistry immediately. You can feel it in the pit of your stomach. Betty and I talked about it. She felt that exact same feeling when she sat down for the Golden Girls table read. We certainly all felt that with this.”

Speaking of White, Leeves acknowledges that much of the success of Hot in Cleveland is due to the TV veteran, who has become an ubiquitous presence on the pop-culture radar these past few years. She has also become an inspiration for Leeves, Bertinelli and Malick.

“We’ve all sort of hit milestone birthdays while doing the show,” says Leeves. “She’s made it OK to claim that. She was saying the other day that you try to hide your age and then, at a certain point, you say ‘No! I’m 90-years-old!’ Where is the cut-off? I think it’s 50. I just turned 50 last year and I was like ‘I’m 50 goddammit!’ You just don’t care anymore.”