{alltv} 'Cleveland' not all White noise

We've all lived long enough to see it. Betty White has become Estelle Getty.

Oddly, we like Betty White channelling Estelle Getty more than we liked Estelle Getty in her heyday as Estelle Getty.

Whatever, the general vibe of White's new sitcom Hot in Cleveland -- which makes its Canadian debut Monday on CTV -- is so endearingly nostalgic that we couldn't help but be drawn into it.

The series, which is a product of the U.S. cable channel TV Land (not the same as the Canadian TV Land), stars familiar faces Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendy Malick as three best friends from Los Angeles who make an unscheduled visit to Cleveland.

Once there, Melanie, Joy and Victoria (Bertinelli, Leeves and Malick, respectively) are shocked to find they are considered "hot" in Cleveland -- as opposed to ancient in L.A. -- so they decide to stay.

The house Bertinelli's character rents comes with a caveat, or should we say, a caretaker. Enter White as Elka Ostrovsky, a wise-cracking octogenarian.

If the term "wise-cracking octogenarian" rings a bell, you might be thinking of White's former series The Golden Girls, which ran from 1985 to 1992. Back then, the "wise-cracking octogenarian" was Getty's Sophia.

Truthfully, we always found Getty's portrayal of Sophia to be incredibly wooden. Beloved by millions for her snappy one-liners, Sophia actually was by far the weakest character on The Golden Girls, a mere insult machine alongside White's Rose, Bea Arthur's Dorothy and Rue McClanahan's Blanche.

White's Elka is something of a 21st-century Sophia.

Elka enters and exits the action just in time to produce the perfect pithy put-down. It's a long-standing TV tradition for old people and little kids automatically to be bluntly insightful, merely due to the idiosyncrasy of their age.

But if parts of Hot in Cleveland are telegraphed, they largely are telegraphed in a way that makes you smile rather than cringe.

There were several significant laughs in the first episode, and not all of them came courtesy of White.

One example: After Bertinelli's Melanie runs into her ex-husband and his new jail-bait fiancee, a distressed Melanie subsequently cries to her pals, "She's so young! She's half my age!" To which Malick's Victoria observes, "Well, darling, that really isn't that young."

Hot in Cleveland is a throwback, and not merely because its main cast has series such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show (White), One Day at a Time (Bertinelli), Frasier (Leeves) and Just Shoot Me (Malick) on their extensive resumes. Hot in Cleveland is a throwback in approach, too.

This is an old-style sitcom, the likes of which usually can be seen only on the youth-oriented Family Channel these days.

Hot in Cleveland is what the recent Kelsey Grammer-Patricia Heaton sitcom Back to You tried to be. But while that short-lived project seemed incredibly forced, Hot in Cleveland comes across as casually comfortable.

Of course, none of that matters unless Hot in Cleveland makes you laugh. If you give it a try, it just might -- and that's not just White noise.