Mildly Excited: The Premiere of Happily Divorced

Happily Divorced - Tichina Arnold & Fran Drescher

This week (okay, it was Wednesday and I’m just now writing this, GAH!) TV Land assaulted us with the season 3 premiere of Hot in Cleveland and the series premiere of the new Fran Drescher vehicle Happily Divorced.  I say “assaulted” because they aired each of these at least 3 times that night, and I even caught one instance where the Happily Divorced premiere aired back-to-back.  What?  That’s crazy!

I watched it both times.

Before we proceed, I should warn you, dear reader, that I am unapologetically a HUGE fan of The Nanny and, subsequently, Fran Drescher.  And obviously, I really really reallyreallyreally want to get into a new Fran Drescher show.  However, I am not loyally blind and accepting of a Fran Drescher situation just because one is offered.  Hell, once The Nanny abandoned it’s original “low-rent Jewish girl plays fish out of water” theme and became a painful, poorly executed game of “Are Fran and Max gonna get together?” every week, I lost interest.  Granted, I’ve seen all the episodes, but I wouldn’t lie on the stand for anything after season 3.

So the premiere was… okay. I think the writers were busy doing their duty to set-up the whole “My husband’s a what?” premise that they weren’t really giving you funny situations or any sort of character depth.  Even Fran was a little flat.  There were a few flashes of that Flushing Queens spitfire and sarcasm that we all know and love (yes, all of us, including you) and that’s keeping me hopeful for future episodes.  The gay ex-husband was uninteresting, not to mention stereotypical – and even the stereotype was devoid of any humor. Hoever, he would have been a hysterical sitcom addition back in ’95. Aside from Fran, I think the parents are the only ones who also hold potential for some serious laughs in future episodes; they weren’t extremely funny here, but out of everyone their characters weren’t sadly stitched together.

Something something about a hispanic guy that kept walking through the set but I think he was actually a character maybe maybe question mark but just like this sentence the dude was seriously ill conceived and injected in really odd places for no reason at all and ice cream is good.

And Tichina Arnold! She’s a great comic actor and has played great supporting roles in sitcoms, but really?  What is she doing on this show?  For starters, you can tell that this character, when created, was not meant to be played by a black woman.  For starters, her name was Judy.  JUDY.  And later on in the episode she made some self-deprecating comment about how she was going home to do nothing, insinuating that she had no life at all. Whaaaaaaat? No. No, you’re wrong. Pamela James has shit to do, okay?  Pammy Pam’s got places to be, and despite any nasty names that Martin may have called her, she was fine and could get a man in a snap.  If your name is Judy and you find yourself alone on a Saturday night because you can’t get a man (and you’re hanging out with Fran Drescher), then you’re likely a whiny, neurotic middle-aged Jewish woman and not a sharp tongued fine-as-hell black woman.  Just saying.

Let’s make something funny happen, HD, and I’ll stick around.  Please don’t make we walk away from Fran.