http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/television/fran-drescher-in-happily-divorced-on-tv-land-review.html
Television Review
Happily Divorced
Life With a Gay Ex-Husband. It Happens.
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: June 14, 2011
Happily Divorced John Michael Higgins and Fran Drescher in the premiere of this TV Land series
on Wednesday. Not so long ago there was nothing funny about a wife discovering that her husband is gay.
The 2002 movie
“Far From Heaven” steeped the subject in
Douglas Sirk-like melodrama. And in 1982,
“Making Love,” a deadly serious movie about a husband who is secretly attracted to a man, was considered shocking.
It’s actually not that big a deal, at least in the eyes of
Fran Drescher.
“Happily Divorced,” her sitcom that begins on Wednesday on TV Land, is about a woman named
Fran who is not fazed by her husband’s revelation and continues to live with him even after they split.
“I blow the leaves — he blows my hair,” Fran says in her trademark nasal bray. “It’s like we are still married.”
Ms. Drescher knows what she is talking about. As with so much of her previous work, including the hit CBS series
“The Nanny,” there is a strong autobiographical streak to “Happily Divorced.” She was married for many years to
Peter Marc Jacobson, who produced and, with Ms. Drescher, created “The Nanny,” and who told her after their divorce that he was gay. The two evidently remain close, since he is an executive producer of this latest series; the gay husband, played by
John Michael Higgins, is named
Peter. “Happily Divorced” is less a sitcom than a showcase for Ms. Drescher’s delightful, if somewhat time-worn, brand of schtick.
It’s natural that she would find a home on TV Land. The cable network that got its start showing reruns of classic sitcoms is rapidly becoming the television equivalent of the Yankees Fantasy Camp or Bloomberg News — a place that puts onetime greats back to work.
“Hot in Cleveland” on TV Land stars
Jane Leeves (“Frasier”), Wendie Malick (“Just Shoot Me”), Valerie Bertinelli (“One Day at a Time”) and
Betty White (practically everything) and begins its second season on Wednesday before “Happily Divorced.” It’s a sitcom about three middle-aged women who move to Cleveland in search of normal (i.e., not too exacting) men, and it is quite funny. Mostly that’s because the actresses are so appealing, but also because the writing is imaginative and a little dark — the comedy is etched in the single woman’s battle with loneliness.
Ms. Drescher’s comedy, on the other hand, is so light that it’s like a vaudeville routine. In the first scene Peter wakes up Fran in bed and blurts out that he is gay.
“But we just had sex during Leno,” Fran retorts. “How gay can you be?”
She whines a bit, then moves on with her life, which includes meeting a dashingly handsome and doting man on her first foray as a newly single woman. Her biggest problem, it turns out, is that her gay ex-husband is jealous of her new beau (
D. W. Moffett), and vice versa.
Ms. Drescher wears a small, knowing smile that serves as a wink to the audience as she glides through scenes without affect or traction — almost as if standing on a wheeled platform like the Rose Parade queen. She isn’t acting, she is being Fran, which is to say, sitcom Fran.
Ms. Drescher has written two memoirs and in both is candid about her troubled life. In 1985 she was raped at gunpoint by an intruder while her husband was tied up and forced to watch; in 2000 she learned she had uterine cancer, a struggle that she won and that inspired her to found a nonprofit organization, the
Cancer Schmancer Movement.
For perhaps understandable reasons, her on-screen life is as cheery, smooth and easy as her real experience was not. That also means that there isn’t much bite to it.
The same was true of an earlier sitcom,
“Living With Fran,” on WB, in which she played a single mother dating a much younger man — one who is not just handsome but also thoughtful and witty. Her children are shocked at first, but they quickly come around: it’s as if Ms. Drescher could not tolerate conflict, even for comic effect.
And that is a drawback for “Happily Divorced.” Ms. Drescher stars in a comedy about marital discord that airbrushes out all traces of pain, sadness or anger. Divorce can be funny, but unmitigated happiness is often a bore.
HAPPILY DIVORCED TV Land, Wednesday nights at 10:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 9:30, Central time.
Produced by Hudson Street Productions. Created by Fran Drescher and Peter Marc Jacobson; Ms. Drescher, Mr. Jacobson and Franco E. Bario, executive producers; Larry W. Jones and Keith Cox, executive producers for TV Land.
WITH: Fran Drescher (Fran), John Michael Higgins (Peter), Tichina Arnold (Judi), Rita Moreno (Dori), Robert Walden (Glen), Valente Rodriguez (Cesar) and D. W. Moffett (Elliot).
