Thank you for being a friend.
A life in TV, why some girls will forever be golden, and why others just don’t measure up.
Almost every day for four years, I spent my first free hour after school watching Golden Girls. A two-mile walk, a dash upstairs, the liberating thud of my backpack on the floor, the fleeting suspicion that I’d forgotten to lock the front door, a sprint back downstairs and up again — and finally, with a breathless leap onto the couch, I’d turn the TV on just in time for Hallmark Channel’s afternoon reruns.
If no one was home, I’d belt out the theme song like I’d been possessed by Beyoncé, and she happened to love the grannies from Miami as much as I did —
Thank you for being a friend.
Travel down the road and back again.
Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidant.
And if you threw a party,
and invited everyone you knew,
you would see, the biggest gift would be from me -
and the card attached would say,
Thank you for being a friend.
I didn’t look up those lyrics online, by the way.
As a kid, I did enjoy other TV shows when I got a chance to watch them. Masterpiece Mystery on PBS was a family event — the rare programming that my grandmother, parents, and I could all enjoy — and resulted in the odd phenomenon that murder mystery series are now comforting reminders of home and childhood.
Jessica Fletcher, Sam Stewart, the Barnaby clan, Detective Inspectors Morse, Foyle, and Lewis — these characters grew as familiar as anyone I knew in real life. And they always managed to solve even the most grisly, senseless crimes, with a bit of humor and romance to boot. (Here’s hoping Lewis’s Sergeant Hathaway — he of the brooding, failed-seminarian sex appeal — gets his own spin-off one day soon.)
M*A*S*H was also a favorite, and a good reminder of the healing power of friendship, a little humor, and fresh-brewed moonshine. Though too smug to be bearable for more than a couple of episodes, Frasier was fun too, because of the endless esoteric references. As a member and eventual captain of my high school’s quizbowl team — and yes, a confirmed nerd — I treated each episode as a Jeopardy-like competition, minus the direct condescension of Alex Trebek.
A staple in my TV diet when I was in elementary school and middle school, Boy Meets World documented the growing pains of Cory Matthews (Ben Savage) and Shawn Hunter (Rider Strong) as they progressed from sixth grade to graduating college. The cast of characters that came in and out of Cory and Shawn’s lives in earlier episodes were fascinating, from notorious gangsters to the eccentric feminist — and one of my earliest heroes — Topanga. In its early seasons, the show also tackled difficult issues like unstable home situations, alcoholism, and drug use. The omnipresent (and perhaps even omniscient) Mr. Feeny was always a stately and wise presence I wished for in my life, but the quality of acting — particularly Ben Savage’s portrayal of Cory — grew more and more histrionic as the show progressed, and though the expanded cast played well together, Savage’s shrill acting ultimately grew too irritating to bear further viewing.
Though its target audience included my age group, the impossibly fast-talking Gilmore Girls hit a little too close to home. Watching Rory succeed time and time again at prep school and then at Yale, all while having an enviable home life, enough sleep, and a steady flow of dates — it was enough to incite a simmering rage in anyone, let alone a high-schooler dealing with the associated academic and social pressures. Only now, nearing graduation from university myself and with considerably more life experience under my belt, can I appreciate the show.
Suffice to say that I didn’t have a lot to contribute to conversations about popular culture — my taste wasn’t of my generation but of my parents’, and I quickly learned that my references were enough to entirely deflate any happily bubbling exchange. Frankly, I still steer clear of conversation about television since my tastes haven’t evolved to include Parks and Rec, 30 Rock,The Office, or Breaking Bad.
But more than my love of murder mysteries and shows with middle-aged target audiences, it was (and is) my undying love for Golden Girls that people found especially comical. Admittedly, the idea of high-school me — a short, excessively sarcastic, and decidedly unglamorous brown girl of 14 — being absolutely, unironically captivated by a sitcom about four white women 40 years her senior — well, it sounds funny, even in print. (Apparently, the idea of current me — now a short, rather sarcastic young woman of 21 — loving Golden Girls is more hipster than humorous.)
Though I spent most of my teenage years determined to dislike my claustrophobic suburban existence, Golden Girls escaped my brooding sense of martyrdom. My frequent existential crises could always be cured by twenty minutes in the company of Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia — my only gripe being that I couldn’t share in their endless supply of cheesecake.
I’m not a sentimental person, so I don’t remember the first episode of Golden Girls I ever saw. I do remember my first impression of the show: that Dorothy was, as my generation phrases it, “my spirit animal” — or, in old speak, “my kindred spirit”. She had an innate power that manifested itself without any effort on her part — her friends loved her but also knew she would call them out without mercy.
Her height may have contributed to that imposing quality, but more than that, it was her acerbic one-liners and incredulous expressions that fueled others’ fear. She was large and in charge and never ashamed of it.
Blanche, meanwhile, knew all about the things I didn’t know very much about yet — dating and sex and other issues that I desperately wanted to worry about, until I had to.
She had endless reserves of self-confidence and never doubted the power of her charm.
No matter how much she loved the dating game, she always came through for her best friends. She exemplified the only Leslie Knope quote I know — “Uteruses before duderuses.”
Rose, on the other hand, was consummately nice. She hailed from the infamous St. Olaf and had loved her husband, Charlie. She always had her friends’ best interests at heart. And she was forever roping her roommates into various charitable causes.
And on the rare occasion she expressed any ill will, she even managed to make her insults sound like compliments.
And who could forget Sophia, a testament to cute old ladies being able to get away with anything?
What still sets this show apart from modern sitcoms is not only the stellar acting on the part of Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty, and the hopefully immortal Betty White — nor is it the quality of the one-liners and verbal sparring. It’s the portrayal of four older women as just that — women who had a lot of life behind them, but a whole lot of living ahead of them, too. These weren’t women who reminisced about college as “the best years of their lives,” or endlessly mourned the relationships that ended, or obsessed over their fading youth. They didn’t live in the past — they handled the present as it came, social change, vacation cruises, retirement and all.
Their episodes were edgier than a lot of network TV is now, and few topics were off limits. Besides its depiction of four older women who weren’t desperate to regain their youth, the show handled AIDS and the stigma that surrounded the disease (“72 Hours”), family members coming out (“Scared Straight”), marriage equality (“Sister of the Bride”), ageist hiring practices (“Rose Fights Back”), and the importance of safe sex (“Valentine’s Day”).
Perhaps even more revolutionary was the show’s positive portrayal of women’s friendships, a rare sight on modern TV. The four women were fiercely loyal to one another, but still saw each other as they really were, warts and all. They were often devastatingly frank about each other’s faults — Dorothy never hesistated to tell Rose how boring her stories of St. Olaf were, or Blanche how ridiculous she was to insist she was thirty. Moreover, the characters weren’t two-dimensional caricatures or stereotypes. There wasn’t any false catfighting, à la Gossip Girl, or stilted melodrama, as in The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Not to mention that money was a real issue for the quartet — no unrealistically fantastic wardrobes and fabulous apartments on a newspaper writer’s paycheck, as in Sex and the City.
There were problems with the show, of course. A lack of diversity, for one — I doubt Miami was ever as lily-white as the show made it out to be. Running jokes involving Blanche’s passion for romance could sometimes devolve into slut-shaming. Sophia sometimes seemed like a walking punchline dispenser rather than a fully developed character.
But for all its faults, to angsty teenaged me, Golden Girls held a different promise than any other cast of characters on TV. They showed that life would, overall, get better as I went along. It would get worse, too, of course — there would be painful divorces and disease and death and ageism. But there would be so much more than that, enough to tip the balances in my favor— friendship and humor and parties and sex.
These were women who had their cheesecake and had no qualms about eating it too.
I don’t have a TV anymore, so watching Hallmark Channel reruns isn’t possible, and Netflix doesn’t stream Golden Girls. I’ve found it endlessly annoying that I can’t watch one of the most watchable shows in television history, and instead of holding out for online access, maybe one day I’ll shell out for a DVD box set of the series. Until then, I’ve sought other shows to fill this particular void, and the closest I’ve come is Hot in Cleveland, a show that follows three women as they navigate middle age by fleeing Los Angeles and relocating to Cleveland.
I’m the first to admit that my enjoyment of Hot in Cleveland is largely the product of its passing resemblance to Golden Girls. Like its predecessor, Hot in Cleveland features four older women — Melanie Moretti (Valerie Bertinelli), Joy Scroggs (Jane Leeves), Victoria Chase (Wendie Malick), and Elka Ostrovsky (Betty White) — trying to navigate life on the “wrong” side of 50, or in Elka’s case, 90. While the characters of Golden Girls have strong identifying traits — Dorothy is sarcastic, Blanche is man-crazy, Rose is sweet, and Sophia cranky — they are only rarely reduced to caricatures. Hot in Cleveland, on the other hand, never allows its lead characters to get past the superficial — Melanie is always nice and slightly naive, Joy “can’t keep a man”, Victoria’s self-involvement would make a narcissist cringe, and old Elka (played by Betty White) makes one of the three women, usually Joy, the punchline of every joke.
Nevertheless, Hot in Cleveland has its good points, too. Victoria’s self-esteem and drive are constants, and her tenacity in fighting for the things she really wants — whether prime movie parts or untested anti-aging products — is a quality I’d like to have. Her running Mrs. Ladypants gag — in which she’s sent increasingly ridiculous products from a Japanese company that’s paying her to be a spokesperson — is flat-out hilarious. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Melanie is too concerned with other people’s feelings and perceptions of her and often ends up obsessing over trivial matters. Nevertheless, she is a genuinely positive person, in the mold of Rose from Golden Girls — often hard to stomach for fundamentally sarcastic people like me, but ultimately more admirable than not. The man-crazy Joy, meanwhile, is a work in progress — once an aesthetician to Hollywood royalty, she goes to college and works as a private investigator with perhaps the funniest character on the show — Bob, a detective played by Dave Foley. Elka is the hard-partying grandmother of the quartet — her penchant for drinking straight vodka, engaging in casual hook-ups, revealing juicy details of her past, and bedazzling jumpsuits are endearing, just like Sophia’s quirks are. But like Sophia’s constant put-downs of Blanche, Elka’s repetitive ragging on Joy — at least once an episode, she makes a joke about Joy being all skin and bones — wears my patience thin and reminds me of how weak the show’s writing can be.
Unlike Golden Girls, what really makes Hot in Cleveland fun to watch, isn’t its lead characters — rather, it’s the recurring characters and guest stars. Perhaps the best episode in the show’s six seasons is “Stayin’ Alive” (Season 5). On the run from the law, the four women decamp to a hideout Elka knows, likely from her Mafia days, but when they arrive, they discover that other criminals have arrived first. That episode features, in addition to the regular cast, comedian Cedric the Entertainer as Reverend Boyce, Georgia Engel (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) as Elka’s ditzy BFF Mamie, Ken Jeong (Community) as a crazed fan of Victoria, Alex Trebek (Jeopardy) as himself, and Dave Foley as Joy’s colleague Bob. If every episode of the show were as well-written as this one, Hot in Cleveland would surely be a hit with more people than just me.
But Hot in Cleveland ultimately suffers from many of the same problems that hurt Golden Girls, and then some. The lack of diversity, perhaps par for the course in the eighties, is actually offensive now. The show doesn’t tackle current issues, though it makes passing references to some, most recently drones. While Golden Girls was more comedy than drama, it had its serious moments — but nothing besides wrinkles and weight gain is ever really serious on Hot in Cleveland. Indeed, the women of Hot in Cleveland are obsessed with appearing younger than they are, so as to attract men — the primary reason they relocated from Los Angeles to Cleveland in the first episode. There’s an argument to be made that the show satirizes the insidious ageism and gender discrimination in the entertainment industry, but Hot in Cleveland, while enjoyable, doesn’t come across as a scathing satire so much as a watery sitcom.
It’s hard, all the same, not to like Hot in Cleveland. It’s the kind of show I can unwind to at the end of a long day—it’s funny, often hilarious, but doesn’t require a lot of brainpower to appreciate. Perhaps best of all, the show doesn’t take itself too seriously — this makes the gags and ridiculous plotlines much more enjoyable than if the cast were going for straight realism.
Because of its winningness, I’m loth to accept that this sixth season will be the last for Hot in Cleveland. Sure, it was never as good as Golden Girls — but it had its own campy merits and was a chance to appreciate the pitch-perfect delivery of Betty White, a reason to watch in and of itself.
Perhaps best of all, Hot in Cleveland was — like Golden Girls, M*A*S*H, Boy Meets World, and all those murder mystery series — a good, true friend while it lasted. There’s not much more you can ask of a TV show.
