Meet Ms. Wilson

Betty White and Emily Osment
in Freeform's Young & Hungry

Tonight's episode of Freeform's sitcom Young & Hungry marks the introduction of a new character, Ms. Wilson -- played by a venerable lady who is anything but young.

The show's writers had laid out this Valentine's Day-themed episode, where after a misunderstanding Gabi has to return a ring she has just learned was not intended for her.  But as originally scripted, before Gabi can get to the ring, a mouse would nab it first.

But, as the show's creator David Holden notes, the network's executives found the mouse bit a bit forced, "and for lack of a better word, cheesy."  And so David and another of the show's writer/producers, Caryn Lucas, took a walk around the CBS Radford studio lot to brainstorm.

With Young & Hungry being directed by Andy Cadiff, who had worked with Betty White all through Hot in Cleveland, the Young writers already knew they wanted to find a way to lure Betty onto their set.  So when David and Caryn decided the plot would instead involve a neighbor in her apartment, "Caryn turned to me and said, 'What if the neighbor is Betty?'," David remembers.

The two rushed back to their offices and pitched the idea to the rest of the staff; ultimately, writer Rachel Sweet, who had spent years on Hot in Cleveland, was elected to write dialogue for Betty's new character:  the five-times-married widow, Bernice Wilson.

Betty filmed her scenes for tonight's episode in December -- not in front of the live audience, but pre-taped, mostly because her scenes would be shot on "swing sets" which are located off to the side of the soundstage, out of the audience's view.  Her scenes completed, Betty had had such a great time  that she indicated that day that she'd like to return.

And so, later this season, look for a romantic episode where Mrs. Wilson and Gabi take a danger-fraught road trip to Vegas.  As Gabi (Emily Osment) suffers through, at 25, her "quarter-life crisis," Bernice, turning 95 on the same day, has a preoccupation of her own:  to meet up with a man she kissed 20 years ago, and with whom she made a pact to meet as they turned 95.  Ultimately, Betty was thrilled not only to come back to Young & Hungry in a bigger plotline revolving around her character, but also to be playing opposite her real-life close friend Carl Reiner, aka Bernice's long-lost beau, Bernie.

As David explains, the writers came up with the idea of the age-based pact when they realized that the episode would be taping on the day of Betty's actual 95th birthday:  January 17, 2017.  After the scenes were shot, the Young & Hungry stages turned into a birthday party for Betty, with a select number of humans, including Carl and also her former Mary Tyler Moore Show and Hot in Cleveland co-star Georgia Engel, and a preponderance of animals.  Throughout the evening, Betty talked with her guests while nonchalantly cradling a porcupine, or armadillo, or a lynx which, David admits, "I was afraid was going to claw her face off."

Betty's second episode, opposite Carl, will air in May -- and it will probably not be her last; Young & Hungry's writers intend to bring back Bernice, whose relationship at ninetysomething is a nice counterpoint to Gabi and Josh's. Now that the show has gotten the "back order" of episodes to comprise the remainder of its fifth season, David explains that while the first ten episodes will be about Gabi and Josh (Jonathan Sadowski) realizing they were meant to be together, "the back ten will be about exploring what that entails."  And as Bernie and Bernice explore their own burgeoning love, the two women will be able to compare notes about what it means to move in with a guy.  "The younger with the older," David says, "is such a great dynamic."

In rerun heaven, she'll always turn the world on with her smile

Cast members of The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
reunited in 2013 on TV Land's Hot in Cleveland.
l-r, Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, Mary Tyler Moore,
Betty White, Georgia Engel

She could turn the world on with her smile, and she will continue to do so for decades and generations to come.  TV icon Mary Tyler Moore died today at age 80, after years of declining health due to her lifelong fight with diabetes.

It was actually through the fight against diabetes that I first met Mary, at a Juvenile Diabetes Walk in New York City, a cause to which she was incredibly dedicated.  An animal lover, Mary also co-hosted with Bernadette Peters the "Broadway Barks" benefit each year, a beautiful event celebrating and adopting out animals in Manhattan's Shubert Alley.

But it was my husband Frank DeCaro's encounter with Mary that I'll always remember.  In 1997, Mary had appeared on Rosie O'Donnell's talk show, and talked about her desire to reunite with Valerie Harper in a new show, to be called "Mary & Rhoda."  At the time, Frank was writing a style column for the New York Times, and so, while searching for a topic for his next piece, he decided to write about what Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern's lives would look like in the late '90s, twenty years after we'd last seen them on our screens.

The day after the column ran, Frank's home office phone rang; the voice on the other end said simply, "Please hold for Mary Tyler Moore."  A few seconds later, he heard, "Hello, Fraaaank?" in that famous quaver.

Valerie Harper and Mary Tyler Moore
attend the taping of NBC's 90th Birthday
Tribute to Betty White, January 2012.

Mary invited Frank to lunch, and of course he eagerly agreed.  But on the appointed date and time, all hell broke loose.  A storm raged in Manhattan, and bricks were falling off a building on Madison Avenue.  President Clinton was in town, causing a giant case of gridlock.  And despite trying to get from Chelsea to the Upper East Side restaurant by both subway and cab and then on foot, Frank arrived over an hour late. (Remember, this was JUST before we all had cell phones in our pockets.) Would a TV icon be furious with him -- or would she be gone?

To Frank's delight, Mary had had company for the hourlong wait -- surprise lunch guest Valerie Harper.  I first met Frank by reading his memoir, A Boy Named Phyllis, about growing up in surburban New Jersey and, yes, adopting the nickname Phyllis, after Elton John's supposed sobriquet for Rod Stewart.  The ladies understood his lateness, and they all three -- Mary, Rhoda and Phyllis -- proceeded to have a lovely lunch while brainstorming what the show could be.

Mary & Rhoda ended up going through several sitcom script iterations before being reconceived as a TV movie for ABC -- which scored high ratings.  Mary and Valerie never did reunite again on their own, although they both did join their former Mary Tyler Moore Show castmates Betty White, Cloris Leachman and Georgia Engel in a 2013 episode of Betty's TV Land sitcom, Hot in Cleveland.

Mary leaves behind an incredible showbiz legacy, from her iconic roles on landmark sitcoms The Dick Van Dyke Show and her own self-titled, groundbreaking '70s hit to amazing performances in films such as 1980's Ordinary People and one of my own silly favorites, 1967's Thoroughly Modern Millie.

The Television Academy's Archive of American Television project is an amazing resource, interviewing our TV legends about the span of their lives and careers.  Here, a link to Mary's full two-hour interview with the Archive, conducted by Diane Werts in New York City in 1997.  At the end, she discusses just how she'd like to be remembered.

Cleveland Rewrites Miami, and "Americain," History

This week, if you've tuned in to The View, or The Joy Behar Show, or The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or... hell, if you've been conscious, you've probably seen one of the ladies of TVLand's promising new original sitcom, Hot In Cleveland, out on the talk show circuit.

The show, TVLand's first original comedy, has an impressive pedigree: it was created by Suzanne Martin, who once worked on Frasier, and executive produced by Sean Hayes, whom we all love from one of my favorite comedies ever, Will & Grace. And its cast hails from long-running shows we all have loved: Valerie Bertinelli from One Day at a Time, Wendie Malick from Dream On and Just Shoot Me, and Jane Leeves, also from Frasier.

But there are other, less obvious sitcom antecedents for Hot In Cleveland, which today received a quite positive review from the hard-to-impress New York Times. Think about it: four women "of a certain age," living together -- Betty White among them. Yes, although the ladies of Cleveland may at first seem younger than Betty, Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty were in 1985, this just could be this generation's Golden Girls.

Fans have been asking for decades different versions of the question: why are there no comedies like The Golden Girls anymore? Why no comedies about older women? Why no decent network programming on a Saturday night? Why can't they just remake The Golden Girls? Hell, why can't the networks seem to launch very many quality comedies at all anymore? (It's telling that it's taking a cable network to take a chance with these 4 gals in their 40s and beyond.)

I've seen parts of the pilot episode, and the four Cleveland gals are sassy like the Girls -- and Betty is in as fine shape as ever. Yes, of course, they seem much younger and hotter than the Girls ever were -- and that's kind of the generational point. When The Golden Girls launched in 1985, its oldest actress, Betty, was 63, and its youngest, Rue, was not yet 51. And the show featured a character, Sophia, who was in her 80s, even if the actress playing her, Estelle, was in real life much younger.

Demographically, Hot in Cleveland isn't much different. Wendie will turn 60 this December. Its youngest star, Jane, is 49. (Valerie just turned 50.) And it also features a character in her 80s, this time played by a real-life 88-year-old dynamo, Betty.

I think that if Hot in Cleveland is a hit, some day academics will compare it to The Golden Girls, and talk about the shows together show "disenfranchised" women in two different generations. Back then, the Girls were considered old, and banded together to save on expenses, and to guarantee healthcare as they aged. The Hot in Cleveland girls are, in the pilot, women who struggle to stay young in competitive L.A., but by any other city's standard -- namely, Cleveland's -- are still beautiful and desirable. And so, when the four ladies have an emergency stopover in that Ohio city, instead of continuing on their Paris getaway, they decided to stay where they feel desired. Isn't that the 21st Century take on the same theme?

By the way, as long as I'm going on about antecedents, I think it's interesting to note that back in 1993, Valerie Bertinelli headlined another, now-forgotten sitcom, Cafe Americain -- in which her character Holly, also seemingly lost in life, heads for Paris. In that show, there was no airline stopover; Holly made it to Paris, worked in the titular expatriate cafe, and found a love interest in writer Marcel (Maurice Godin.)

So in my trivia-filled mind, I kind of consider Hot in Cleveland to be that show's sequel series, allowing Valerie to find love this time closer to home where we want her. (But Hot in Cleveland writers: I wouldn't mind a cameo from Sofia Milos as model Fabiana Borreli, or the fabulous Jodi Long as the deposed dictator's wife, Madame Ybarra. N'est-ce pas?)

Hot in Cleveland

debuts tonight, June 16

10 PM Eastern/Pacific

TV Land

I Heart Betty, and Hot in Cleveland

2010 has been the year of Betty White. And now that we've lost her fellow Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, we need to show Betty the love more than ever. That's why I was glad to see a batch of new goodies available on Facebook, care of Betty's new TVLand sitcom Hot in Cleveland, which debuts on June 16.

Click here for your very own Betty button -- and a bunch of other Cleveland-related stuff!

Betty Does Today

This morning, Betty White appeared on The Today Show, talking with Meredith Vieira about her upcoming hosting gig on SNL this weekend. Check out the clip below -- and the use of "Betty White Lines" audio in Meredith's intro!

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