Review: Fran Drescher’s "Happily Divorced" Unhappily Mediocre

John Michael Higgins and Fran Drescher in Happily Divorced

It’s pretty easy to see how Fran Drescher has become a gay icon: the woman with the face and body of a super-model has one of the most annoying voices of all time. But in best gay icon fashion, Drescher has chosen to “own” her voice, and her Queens roots, by exaggerating them in the campiest way possible.

Naturally, superstardom was inevitable.

Even better, the star of The Nanny has now created a sitcom based on her real-life experience with her ex-husband, Peter Marc Jacobson who revealed, after many years of marriage, that he is gay.

In the pilot for Happily Divorced, Drescher’s character, once again named Fran (as in The Nanny), learns almost immediately that her husband Peter is gay. They agree to divorce, but they can’t afford to sell their house at a loss and they can’t afford to live apart, so they choose to go on to living together for financial reasons, even if they’re both seeing other people.

Meanwhile, Fran’s mother, played by another gay icon, Rita Moreno (looking fabulous at an impossible-to-believe age 79!), stops by from time to time to trade quips with her, as does her best friend, played by Everybody Hates Chris’ Tichina Arnold.

This sounds like a show that would be almost impossible to screw up, doesn’t it?

Well, they screwed it up. It’s jaw-droppingly bad. Or, rather, it’s jaw-droppingly mediocre: absolutely obvious and utterly predictable in every possible way.

How could Fran not have known that her husband was gay? Cue an endless list of gay stereotype jokes that aren’t offensive, but are so very, very tired.

Please don’t make me repeat any of them here.

One interesting thing: we've reached a point in society where having a major gay character on a sitcom can not only be boring, it can be utterly conventional. That's a turning point of some sort, isn't it?

Rita Moreno (center)

The one confounding factor here? Happily Divorced is TV Land’s third original show, one of which is Hot in Cleveland – a show that’s only slightly better than this one, but some people choose to watch anyway because of its bevy of beloved (and very charismatic) stars.

In other words, part of me thinks that TV Land wants these shows to be mediocre and predictable in every possible way, because they’re both parodying and paying ironic homage to the bad sitcoms of the past that they air the rest of the time.

There’s something very meta about the whole thing: both mock and celebrate some of the worst that pop culture has to offer. It’s TV’s version of comfort food, and the point is stay firmly locked in the past, never doing anything original, never threatening the viewer in any way.

It’s also worth noting that this review is based solely on the pilot (a copy of which was provided for review by TV Land), and pilots – especially of “high concept,” single-premise sitcom shows like this – are often very bad.

Drescher is a very funny woman, and there’s no doubt in my mind that she and her gay ex-husband (who is acting as co-writer and co-creator here, as he did on The Nanny) have complete artistic control.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll turn this ship around before too long, and it’ll become somewhat watchable.

Another possibility is that the viewers of TV Land really will mistake it for some tired sitcom from decades past, or they'll see it as the camp it might have been intended to be, and choose to watch it anyway.