Elegy for Cleveland

Elegy for Cleveland

Nicolaus Mills: Elegy for Cleveland

TV Land, the network that specializes in reruns, has a new show, Hot in Cleveland, that is packing in viewers. The show is based on three forty-something women getting stuck in Cleveland when their Los Angeles-to-Paris plane has to make an emergency landing. The women, played by veteran television actresses Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves, and Wendie Malick, decide to pass their down time in a dive bar, and much to their surprise, they find that the men in the bar, unlike the men they have known in Los Angeles, appreciate their beauty and smarts. They decide to pull up roots and settle in Cleveland.

The larger premise of the show?life in the boonies can be kinder and superior to life in the big city–is a familiar one. In the nineties Northern Exposure ran with that idea for five years in a show that featured a young doctor from New York, played by Rob Morrow, discovering the virtues of life in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska.

There is no reason why Cleveland can?t be turned into an updated Cicely. But as someone who was born in Cleveland and grew up there, I am made uneasy by Hot in Cleveland. Cicely?s story is one of a remote, small town that was always small and remote. Cleveland?s story is one of a thriving, big town that has shrunk into a poorer, small town.

The Cleveland I grew up in during the 1950s and early 1960s was a city with just under a million people and a prosperous industrial base. It had three papers and included among its most prominent figures George Szell, the brilliant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, the author of the influential The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, and Paul Brown, the genius coach of the Cleveland Browns football team. In my day, you didn’t joke about Cleveland. You enjoyed shopping downtown at Christmas, and you took pride in the numerous steels mills that glowed at night.

What went wrong in Cleveland is the same as what went wrong in its Midwestern neighbors, Detroit and Pittsburgh: de-industrialization and globalization took the life out of the city. In a comparatively short time, Cleveland was reduced to half the size it was at its peak. Two of its three papers disappeared. Its school system became dysfunctional, and the neglected Cuyahoga River, which runs through the heart of the city, got so polluted that it caught fire, inspiring pop composer Randy Newman to write his satirical hit, ?Burn on Big River.?

This is the back story that Hot in Cleveland won?t be dealing with as it goes for laughs. That is only right, given the demands of television. But it is this back story that makes Hot in Cleveland possible, and I cannot forget this piece of history every time I tune in. These days we don?t have policies for replacing the Clevelands of our country with something better. We only have elegies.