Akron native Rachel Sweet savors writer-producer role on 'Hot in Cleveland'

Published: Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 12:20 PM     Updated: Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 12:52 PM

By Mark Dawidziak, The Plain Dealer

 

TV LANDRachel Sweet, left, with "Hot in Cleveland" stars Wendie Malick, Jane Leeves and Valerie Bertinelli.

You can reinvent your life. It might be a wild and unpredictable ride. You might hit a few gaping potholes along the way. But, yes, you can reinvent your life.
That notion has been the source of many a laugh since "Hot in Cleveland" premiered last June. And it brings us to one of the many reasons Akron native Rachel Sweet is an ideal writer and co-executive producer for the TV Land sitcom, which resumes its second season at 10 p.m. Wednesday.
"I am the queen of reinvention," Sweet said during a telephone interview. "Looking back over my life, yeah, you could say I've been through a few metamorphoses."
If you remember her as a rock star from the late '70s and early '80s, you might be thinking, "Hold on, is this that Rachel Sweet?" It sure is, and when she gave up the grind of music tours at the tender age of 20, she already was no stranger to reinvention.
Sweet began her singing career at the age of (ready?) 3. She won an electric garage-door opener at a local talent contest.
"I sang 'I'm a Little Dutch Girl,' which clearly wasn't true," Sweet said. "But it was good enough to win an electric garage-door opener."
It also was good enough to open up a career path. She was singing commercial jingles at 6, later touring with Mickey Rooney. She was an opening act for Bill Cosby at 12, when she began recording country music.
That was 1974. She switched to rock 'n' roll and released her first album, "Fool Around," in 1978.
"It does seem like 100 years ago," said Sweet, 48. "I have two kids now, 11 and 8, and they Google me all the time and watch these old videos on YouTube, and it just shocks me. I'm not only shocked by how I look but by how nascent the video business was. The videos are so literal and horrible."
Her 1981 duet with Rex Smith, "Everlasting Love," was a hit, but, a year later, she was ready for another round of reinvention.
"I just accepted it for what was happening at the time," Sweet said. "It was fun, and I didn't think of it as weird. But I was very impressionable, and I certainly quit music because I think I was a little too impressionable."
Too impressionable? Care to elaborate on that?
"Well, I still had a record deal at Sony and I had done this duet with Rex Smith," Sweet said. "And at that point I was drinking and doing a lot of things I shouldn't have been doing, and I realized I just wasn't happy being on the road anymore. I wanted to quit. I'd been on the road eight or nine months a year for five years. I was burnt, definitely."
Time to get off the road and seek another path.
"It was a big realization," she said. "I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew that I didn't want to do that anymore."
Sweet decided to give college a try. There was a slight roadblock there. She never got her diploma from Firestone High School. She had been too busy touring and making music.
She was living with her sister in New York at the time, so the 20-year-old made an appointment with a dean at Columbia University.
"I kind of talked my way in," Sweet said. "I went to the dean of Columbia and told him about my life experience, and he put me on probation for a semester. If I did 3.5 or better, I could stay, and if not I had to leave."
Four years later, she had earned her degree in French and English literature. She was going to be a writer, until director John Waters recruited her to co-author and record the title track for his 1988 film, "Hairspray."
"John told me I should go into acting," said Sweet, who also contributed songs to Waters' "Cry-Baby" (1990). "He thought my voice was so strange, he told me I should act. I wasn't all that flattered. I said, 'No, I'm a singer.' And he said, 'No, you should meet my agent.' "
Why not? So the former country singer, rock star and college student tried acting.
"And I didn't really want to do that, either, but I ended up acting for about five or six years," Sweet said. "It was such a lark. I was not really an actor, but people kept hiring me to be their sarcastic best friend."
In 1989, she became the host and star of "The Sweet Life," a series on the Comedy Channel, the forerunner to Comedy Central.
"I did write for that, but I had a staff of writers, including Jon Stewart," she said. "You've heard of him. It was kind of a trial by fire."
In 1992, she landed the role of George Costanza's cousin on "Seinfeld." Yet another realization was waiting around the Hollywood corner.
"I love writing, and all of my friends were writers," Sweet said. "So I finally got the hint and sat down and wrote a spec script around 1996. Then the writing and producing jobs started coming my way. And producing means you're just moving up in the ranks as a writer."
She was a writer-producer on "Sports Night," "Dharma & Greg," "George Lopez" and other half-hour comedies. Her agent suggested she would be perfect for "Hot in Cleveland," a sitcom starring Valerie Bertinelli as Melanie, a novelist in her 40s forsaking youth-obsessed Los Angeles and trying to convince her two best friends that, for them, Cleveland is the best location in the nation.
"The Internet can help make you an instant expert on anything, like what it's like to live in Cleveland, but having someone in the writers' room who has actually done it is invaluable," said Suzanne Martin, the creator and executive producer of "Hot in Cleveland." "She gives us the insider's perspective on how the locals might perceive what our ladies are doing, as well as local terms and sites and things they might do."
Sweet had plenty of sitcom experience. She was in her 40s. She was from Northeast Ohio. And then there was that whole reinvention thing.
"It certainly didn't hurt that I was from the area," said Sweet, who is married to Tom Palmer, a writer whose credits include AMC's "Mad Men."
Sweet isn't the only "Hot in Cleveland" producer from Northeast Ohio. Steve Skrovan, a graduate of Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills, is a writer and co-executive producer. And Robert Heath, also from Akron, is the show's line producer.
"Rachel and I know both Cleveland and Los Angeles, and it's helpful to have people who know both towns, both sensibilities," Skrovan said. "We can make casting suggestions. We can recommend locations and names. We can say if something seems too Los Angeles or not quite Cleveland."
And they do, helping, with Heath, to keep the "Hot in Cleveland" world seem more like Cleveland.
"I landed in a nice place," Sweet said. "I've got a wonderful husband who goes over my scripts and changes them for the better. I have two terrific, well-rounded kids. I get to go to a great place with really fun, experienced writers. So life is good."
And there is absolutely no temptation to slip in front of the camera.
"Not at all," she said. "I'd rather sit in a room with the writers. I was a stage performer from the age of 6. I was on stage enough. If I never sit in another makeup chair, that will be fine with me. I was able to shut off the spotlight without a regret."

Rachel in Smash Hits 1979

Rachel Sweet Sourcebook Magazine

‘Hot in Cleveland’ has Rachel Sweet’s stamp

March 6, 2011 by Akron Beacon Journal

By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal popular culture writer

Hot in Cleveland has been smokin’ for TV Land, its most-watched show ever, and the network recently ordered a 22-episode third season.
Some of the credit goes to Akron’s Rachel Sweet.
The former pop singer has been writing and producing for television for about 15 years and joined Hot in Cleveland as a writer and co-executive producer in its current, second season. She has written three episodes, one of which, The Sisterhood of the Traveling SPANX, may be the funniest Hot in Cleveland ever. It also contained several Grady Sizemore jokes — since Elka, the character played by Betty White, belongs to Grady’s Ladies.
”I’m still watching the Indians, unfortunately,” Sweet said in a recent telephone interview from California, where she now lives with her husband, writer-producer Tom Palmer, and their sons, ages 10 and 7.
”We almost had Grady come out for the episode, and then kind of realized halfway through [the writing] that we didn’t really need him — but did want to use his name. So he signed off on that, which was really nice of him. . . . But when I wrote [Sizemore hitting] three home runs, that was just, you know, dreaming. Wishful thinking!”
As for how she joined Hot in
Cleveland, Sweet said: ”I met with [Hot creator] Suzanne Martin, and we got along great. And, obviously, just the chance to work with Betty White was beyond belief. I snapped at it.”
Did her familiarity with the Ohio setting help?
”I certainly mentioned it,” she said with a laugh. ”There aren’t a ton of Ohio references but what there are probably come from me. I don’t think it was key in my hiring. But it certainly helped that I have roots there.”
It also helped that Sweet has a lot of writing credits, including on Sports Night, George Lopez and Dharma & Greg. All the Hot writers, she said, ”are people with a lot of experience. In that way, the [script] drafts come in good. We don’t have to do a lot of work on them because everybody knows what they’re doing.”
But this is a big ensemble to write for, including not only White but — as three L.A. women now living in Cleveland — Valerie Bertinelli (wife of Cuyahoga Falls’ Tom Vitale), Wendie Malick (a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan) and Jane Leeves.
Asked how to balance them in a script, Sweet said: ”Betty is our hammer. Which means she comes in and nails the scene — she hits every joke. But we don’t use her a lot. We use our other actresses because our other actresses are amazing as well. I mean, Wendie Malick delivers all the time. Valerie is probably one of the sweetest people I have ever met . . . and Jane Leeves, a total pro. You can write for all of them. And they’re easy to write for, because Suzanne was able to define those characters so clearly, that you know what you’re writing.
”People say it’s sort of a retro show, but I don’t know. It’s actually pretty modern. It’s just sort of shot in a retro way. Nobody’s talking to the camera. It’s just shot kind of straight-on, letting the comedy breathe and the story breathe.” The modernity is in ”the actual references and the actual stories about three women in their 40s and 50s and the way they are dealing with becoming that age.”
Sweet, in her late 40s, is in the same age bracket as the characters. ”as are all my fellow writers. I think our youngest writer is maybe late 30s. But you know, Rich, out here that’s kind of how it’s going. Writing staffs are getting smaller, just because of the economy, so show-runners want people who know how to write. They’re not necessarily in bringing people up and bringing people along. . . . It’s not there are more older writers working. I just think that, because there are a lot fewer jobs, jobs are going to people with a lot of experience first.”
And writing is a tough gig. In recent years, Sweet said, she had a series development deal with ABC that involved writing four or five pilots, which never became series, and ”to go in and help shows for a couple of weeks if they needed help.”
The process of selling a show is ”seasonal angst,” she said. ”You spend a lot of time developing a show. The networks buy it. You write it. And they give you notes. You take all the notes and it changes dramatically. If it does get to pilot, you don’t even recognize it much of the time. It’s debilitating, but the prize at the end is being able to sit in a room with really funny people and have that be your job.”
But even shows that get sold may not go well. Sweet worked on an NBC sitcom, 100 Questions, that was so short-lived, ”it ended up being six questions. . . . NBC pretty much hated the show from the beginning. It’s like, they bought it and then decided they didn’t like it. . . . I think they ended up airing them somewhere deep in the summer when nobody would be watching, on weird nights.”
Then there was 2004′s Commando Nanny. It was supposed to be a sitcom for the old WB network, produced by and based on the experiences of reality-show mastermind Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice). As the name indicates, it was about a former military commando working as a nanny. Really.
”Oh, my God, it was such a fiasco!” Sweet said. ”There was Mark Burnett . . . and there was the WB, wanting to get a reality show from Mark Burnett. I met with him probably a year before, and he pitched Commando Nanny, and I said, ‘No, I can’t write that.’ He went off and got another writer to write the pilot, and the pilot was shot. I was on a deal with Warner Bros., and I got a call from [Warner Bros. TV boss] Peter Roth, and he said, ‘Guess what? You’re running Commando Nanny.‘ ” Sweet had no choice, since — as she put it — Roth ”signs my checks.”
”It was a business deal, basically,” Sweet said. The WB ”gave [Burnett] a scripted show because they wanted a reality show from him. And neither one ever materialized, because it was an ill-conceived situation. Sometimes you get caught in those and, you know, you write your best stuff and you see what happens.”
But, I asked, weren’t there times when she thought she could just go and do oldies shows, singing her hits and making money without angst? She laughed.
”Well, yes,” she said. ”There are times when I am so frustrated. . . . [She and Palmer] just look at each other and say, ‘This is kind of the path we chose.’ I think a lot of people would love to be doing what we’re doing.”