100 Favorite Shows: #50 — The Golden Girls
“No matter how bad things get, remember these sage words: You’re old, you sag, get over it.”
Near to where Toy Story Land now entertains guests at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando, Florida once stood a simple set with a vaulted living room and a cozy kitchen. This was the home owned by Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan) and further occupied by Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur), Rose Nylund (Betty White), and Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty). It was the home on The Golden Girls. From 1985 to 1992, the Susan Harris-created sitcom about four women thriving in their golden years delighted NBC (it was produced by Buena Vista) viewers every Saturday night. Their loves, losses, and lives were treated with the requisite sympathy of a show built on tenderness — with plenty of bucolic, uproarious comedy, too.
(Spoilers for The Golden Girls are in this essay. Yes, they exist. Yes, they’re best avoided if you’re sensitive to those stories.)
I have a tradition in the world of sports. Whenever one of my beloved teams loses a championship in their respective sport, I avoid all ESPN coverage of the game and turn on reruns of The Golden Girls instead. Recently, the Bruins lost to the Blues, the Celtics to the Lakers, the Patriots to the Eagles. Each loss embodied a different degree of disappointment, but each one also came with an hour-long trip to a charming home in Miami, Florida. The Golden Girls is practically the opposite of sports, so it allowed me to escape from a world with the Philly Special and instead savor a world where four older women gathered around a kitchen table to dine on some Philly cheesecake. How comforting it was to push a loss out of my mind and instead grab a slice of dessert with a wholesome group of characters who only wanted to support one another. In so doing, they supported me, too.
Luckily, one of the episodes I first saw of The Golden Girls was one of the many clip shows the comedy produced over the years. I’d seen episodes of The Golden Girls here and there during programming blocks that coupled it with Murder, She Wrote, appealing to my father. But viewing the clip shows gave me an overall idea of the show’s identity and characterizations. I got to see Stan (Herb Edelman) as a delightful recurring character in the same tier as David Wallace on The Office or Frank and Estelle Costanza on Seinfeld. I got to see Blanche force a laugh when she thought Rose’s dating a little person was just a “prank.” I got to see Rose slowly realize Frank (John McMartin) was professionally pious and exasperatedly remark, “He’s a priest, isn’t he?!” I got to be exposed to the subtle, overlooked greatness that was The Golden Girls.
The clip show style episode was a frequently revisited format for The Golden Girls, but it was not as prevalent as the installments where the ladies gathered to reminisce on memories we hadn’t seen before. Memories of Mother’s Day, a young Dorothy (Lynnie Greene), and, of course, how the group met and came to be roommates in the first place.
These latter memories unfold in season one’s “The Way We Met,” which works as an origin story for the group. After a viewing of Psycho prompts them to forego sleep and instead dash into the kitchen for a cheesecake, The Golden Girls pulls back the floral curtains on how these four women came to know each other when they all possessed such disparate backgrounds.
Throughout the installment, framed around one of their myriad, nightgown-laden 1:00 A.M. chats, the group recalls how Blanche’s home wound up opening up to a need for multiple roommates and — what luck! — she found one just seconds after posting the flyer in the local supermarket.
This was Rose. When Rose met Blanche, she was absolutely delighted by the massive personality emanating from the southern drawl-marked homeowner. Conversely, Blanche viewed Rose’s dimness as just an eccentric sense of humor, until seeing that Rose truly was childlike. With the invitation to become roommates revoked, it took an act of kindness regarding the passing on of a domesticated cat to a young child to prompt Blanche’s re-invitation.
They’re both very different kinds of people and this divide was only deepened by Dorothy’s introduction into the roommate search, as she instigated many of the initial conflicts of their housemate tenure, due to her slightly abrasive demeanor. It takes Rose’s retelling of St. Olaf’s “Great Herring War” to break down their stony relationships, implement some laughs (which seemed to be genuine from both Arthur and McClanahan), and teach them that it’s possible to live alongside conflicting character traits. The episode, as a whole, depicts how laughter can unify unique people, lonely and searching for companionship. At first, Blanche might have looked for sexier, more swinging people to move into her home. Instead, she found what she needed: people who cared for her and supported her, in spite of their faults and in spite of her own.
Their varying personas helped to delineate the archetypes found in many comedies. Its depiction of these four characters (The Sarcastic One, The Slutty One, The Stupid One, and The Shameless One) was not a game-changer in television, but it does remain one of the most perfectly executed examples of defining characters so distinctly as having one adjective and still allowing them to blend melodiously with one another.
Dorothy Zbornak was sarcastic, yes (“Next time I walk into a dark room in the middle of the night, I’ll send a mariachi band ahead of me”), but she was also the one who took initiative in the group. Never afraid to have a hard conversation when she felt Blanche was in an abusive relationship or if she needed to contact the authorities after witnessing a crime she would not abide, Dorothy was the de facto leader, even if the show insisted that it had three leads, not one.
Part of Dorothy still exists in the meme culture of today (Arthur and her legacy appeal to many young creatives) and I believe much of this is due to the gravitas Arthur brought to a role that could’ve been a hokey machine designed to react bluntly with a punchline whenever the more fun characters spit out some inane statement. As a stage actor, Arthur was deft at milking a joke with just a scowl or a lengthy pause as she stared down any one of her roommates, letting the audience’s laughter build and build. However, she was also a sitcom veteran, who had chemistry with anyone (Edelman, McLanahan, and especially Getty, for example). Dorothy’s role on The Golden Girls was akin to that of someone like Michael on Arrested Development (hey, Mitch Hurwitz worked on both series!). A reluctant leader who takes on responsibility because they have to, but is also not afraid to chastise others with direct criticism or sardonic one-liners.
Part of what made Dorothy great was the relationship she maintained with her mother, Sophia. Most of the time, Sophia was hellbent on having a go at Dorothy, but she did occasionally let her guard down for a moment of intimacy or gratitude at the plateau their dynamic had achieved over time. For every endearing use of the nickname, “Pussycat,” though, Sophia was also quick with a zinger at the expense of one of her friends (“I managed to live 80, 81 years. I survived pneumonia, two operations, a stroke. One night, I’ll belch and stable Mable here will blow my head off!”).
Over time, Sophia became the equivalent of Kramer. (In some episodes, you can almost hear the audience giggling as Sophia enters a room, knowing she’s about to crack off jokes like they were glow sticks. Occasionally, the camera would even pan slowly onto Sophia’s face, teasing and drawing out what was sure to be a shocking punchline, charging up and ready to unload from the mouth of an unexpectedly raunchy elderly woman.) Sophia was a phenomenon, even in spite of the formulaic humor she eventually fell within the pattern of. (Stories about Sicily appeared as frequently as episodes about one of the titular Girls getting engaged or threatening to move out.) But it was also Sophia who could put the characters back in order, providing them hopeful advice and frequently causing them to rally around her own well-being and approach forgiveness with one another (over whatever petty squabble they endured that week) along the way.
No character was the recipient of Sophia’s ire more than Rose, whose lack of common sense and proclivity for rambling on about various Scandinavian figures from her home town in Minnesota seemed to be outright despised by Sophia. After all, the only location mentioned more than either Miami or Sicily was St. Olaf and these stories frequently went nowhere. (Kind of like Jason and Jacksonville on The Good Place. Sensing a pattern? Many archetypes are owed to the mastery of The Golden Girls, even if Rose didn’t invent the idea of a “dumb character.”)
Rose did have some ability (she played the piano for many songs performed by the group, including one that described Miami as having “blue sky, sunshine, white sand by the mile”), but ultimately, her role in the show was to knock down the myriad punchlines the writers’ room had ready to go for characters who severely lacked in intelligence. In “Beauty and the Beast,” the series’ funniest moment comes courtesy of Dorothy, Blanche, and Rose interacting with one another and setting up a perfectly humorous reaction from Dorothy.
The episode features Sophia bonding with her new nurse (Edie McClurg), who is not favored by the rest of the home. The exchange transpires as follows.
Blanche: “Dorothy, at 2:00 A.M. this morning, I was entertaining a gentleman caller, when [the nurse] opened the door, at the most inopportune time. I could have lost my balance and chipped a tooth!”
Rose: “You think that’s annoying? She came into my room last night when I was reenacting the gang-plank scene from Peter Pan!”
Dorothy: “What the hell goes on at night in this house?!”
But of course, the idea of Rose dabbling in Neverland is completely within character. Just as it was for Blanche to spend the wee hours of the evening contorting herself for the sake of sex.
Blanche was definitely one of the most sex-obsessed characters in the history of television (she is the first one the characters turn to when they need a pair of handcuffs and Dorothy dubs her “Hot Pants”), but her character was also defined by the fact that she was a southern debutante. Plucked seemingly from a Tennessee Williams play, Blanche came from a family who would probably describe the Civil War as “disruptive.” Her conceptions of southern Justice include electrocution of intruders (in “Break In,” which contained trigger-happy machinations akin to “Job Hunting,” which provided the line, “I’m as jumpy as a virgin at a prison rodeo,” and Dorothy’s reaction, “That’s pretty jumpy.”), hairspray, and wishing her escort for the night, Lester (Robert Rothwell), was shot instead of her family heirloom vase. However, she also pushed past the Devereaux way to become as accepting of others as her friends taught her to be.
This manifests most progressively (for the time) in season six’s “Sister of the Bride,” when Blanche’s brother, Clayton (Monte Markham), wishes to marry Doug (Michael Ayr). At first, she’s reluctant and unable to accept the thought of her brother being gay. Ideally, a sibling wouldn’t dream of cutting off contact just because of whom he chooses to love, but Blanche needs prodding all the same. Even when she does make strides to apologize to Clay, she still stops along the way to comfort a distraught Rose on the living room couch. Yes, it was important for Blanche to make amends with her brother, but it was also important for her to comfort a friend in her time of need. After all, they shared their lives and time and attention with one another; it was more than just a home, as Rose’s daughter (Lee Garlington), declared.
The four women cared deeply about one another. “At least we’re together,” Dorothy remarks when they comfort one another after their home was broken into. “We have each other.” Each of them struggled to move on from the loss of their husbands (whether that was in the form of Stan’s infidelity or the deaths of Charlie (Rose’s husband) and George (Blanche’s). It wasn’t just about finding replacement men to move on with their lives (Miles (Harold Gould) was definitely a catch), though. It was about finding people who could understand the places they were at in their lives and provide the love needed for the twilight era of their lives. The Golden Girls was an older depiction of a hangout comedy with roommates navigating their fifties and sixties (and eighties), rather than their twenties. But the characters embodied representation for a rare demographic (post-menopausal women, the elderly) depicted on television. In The Golden Girls, we saw the sex lives and emotional insecurities and journeys of figures who are typically shown in society as being grandmotherly, quaint, and perfect.
Yes, it could be predictable (Dorothy’s role as a teacher was only reminded to the viewers when it was convenient for the story, especially in the case of poor Mario (Mario Lopez) who was deported as a result of Dorothy’s meddling with his English classwork) and heavy-handed (the entirety of “Brother, Can You Spare That Jacket?”). Yes, a moment was telegraphed as serious with an ad break introduced by two foreboding piano notes. But that’s exactly what made The Golden Girls so sweet and comforting.
That bumper music was comforting. That refrigerator full of desserts was comforting. Even just the distinct voices of the four main actors was comforting. You could close your eyes and drift into the multi-colored floral patterns of the kitchen tablecloth where some things never change, feeling like there was a home to return to in Miami, Florida, if ever you felt the need to not feel so alone. Or, in my case, to not feel so despondent after the loss of a sports team. Rajon Rondo’s a Hawk now. Tom Brady’s a Buccaneer, Zdeno Chára’s a Capital. But Sophia, Blanche, Rose, and Dorothy? They’re golden forever.
