The Golden Girls’ four leads, from left to right, Sophia (Estelle Getty), Blanche (Rue McClanahan), Rose (Betty White) and Dorothy (Bea Arthur) are seen in the show’s second season. The women live together in Blanche’s house in Miami.Alice S. Hall/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Given my own birth year (1983); my extensive sitcom viewing history; and my love of a good or even not-so-good rerun, The Golden Girls ought to have been a rewatch. But no. While I’m sure I’d caught glimpses of it here and there, 2024 became the year I finally sat down and watched the series start to finish. This is, I’d assume, what 2024 will be remembered for in the world at large.
What took me so long to meet The Golden Girls? It was on at weird times, maybe, or perhaps I saw the old ladies and assumed, as a kid, it wasn’t for me. But the magic of streaming meant that suddenly all seven seasons awaited me. How could I refuse? The show, which aired from 1985 until 1992, was the four-women-led precursor to such classics as Designing Women, Sex and the City and Girls. Having seen those shows, it felt like a dues-paying obligation to at least give it a shot.
For the uninitiated – and this was me until several months ago – The Golden Girls is about four women, Blanche (Rue McClanahan), Rose (Betty White), Dorothy (Bea Arthur) and her elderly mother Sophia (Estelle Getty). They live together in Blanche’s house in Miami.
It’s described as a show with archetypes, but this isn’t quite it. It’s more that there’s an equilibrium to the show, brought about by the elegant way the overarching traits are distributed. Among the three younger ones, there’s a smart one (Dorothy), a dense one (Rose) and a normal one (Blanche). There’s also a promiscuous one (Blanche), a frustrated one (Dorothy) and a normal one (Rose). Sophia’s thing is being old, which she does convincingly, this despite Getty having been a mere 62 – a touch younger than her own own-screen daughter. And insofar as “old” functions a personality trait, Sophia is the savvy one. She’s not fazed by an old friend of Dorothy’s being a lesbian. (To give a sense of the times, Blanche, the one sleeping with much of Miami, has never heard of lesbians.) Much like a certain real-life “diminutive” counterpart, Sophia can say the things precisely because you wouldn’t expect them to come from a proper little elderly woman. As Jim Colucci, author of Golden Girls Forever, a 2016 history of the show, put it, “for some reason audiences are more willing to accept more risqué dialogue from an older lady.”
When that aforementioned counterpart, iconic sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, died in July, obituaries referred to a dissonance between message and messenger. Per the New York Times, no one “could … have anticipated that the messenger of Eros would be a 4-foot-7 middle-aged teacher with a delivery that The Wall Street Journal described as ‘something like a cross between Henry Kissinger and a canary.’ ” And in these pages: “Westheimer’s giggly, German-accented voice, coupled with her four-foot-seven frame, made her an unlikely looking – and sounding – outlet for ‘sexual literacy,’ ” noting, “The contradiction was one of the keys to her success.”
I kept seeing this talk of unlikeliness, and tried to square it with the fact that there is nothing “unlikely” about an older woman – trained psychologist or otherwise – knowing a thing or two about sex. And why would it matter that she was short? Was the idea that she wasn’t tall enough to reach the bits in question, or even The Joy of Sex if it were up on too high of a shelf?
But of course I knew exactly what was meant. Dr. Ruth was a sexpert, but not a sex symbol. She was a woman in the public eye, discussing intimate matters, but not someone your average heterosexual man was fantasizing about.
But were the “girls” even, I hasten to ask … old? I had thought of the show as being about retirees who’d moved down to Florida for their “golden” years. That three of the women are in their 50s and employed didn’t square with this. Ancient from the vantage point of a child, and too old to be ingenues, but middle-aged, not elderly.
Once I started watching the show, I was not won over immediately. Pedantic Dorothy annoyed me, which I only later realized was because I am a Dorothy. Blanche seemed one-note – like yes, we get it, you’re a Southern belle who sleeps around. Rose’s anecdotes from her rustic childhood in St. Olaf, Minn., only take on an absurd quality in the later seasons.
The weakest episodes, clustered early on, have an afterschool-special quality. The public service topics are commendable – among them homelessness, sexual harassment and chronic fatigue syndrome – but awareness-raising is never any program’s high point.
The Golden Girls was nevertheless growing on me. By the first episode of Season 2 – the one where Blanche thinks she’s pregnant but is (as will surprise no one watching what is after all The Golden Girls) in menopause – I was hooked. It was such an epic, silly twist on the sitcom pregnancy-plotline trope, dealt with in a way that was sensitive (Blanche has big feelings about getting old) and lighthearted. The show had taken a less preachy and more outrageous turn, and would only go further in that direction.
It’s a fictional universe unbothered by consistency, which only adds to its charm. Blanche’s father, “Big Daddy,” is not just played by two different actors but seems like a completely different character each time. Rose learns that her professor boyfriend Miles is just posing as one as part of the witness protection program, yet a later episode has him back to being the professor. This is not remarked upon, nor is the fact that Miles is played by the same actor (Harold Gould, aka Rhoda’s father from The Mary Tyler Moore Show) who, as a differently-named but identical-seeming character, ended Rose’s sexual dry spell several seasons earlier.
Why does Sophia’s sister, visiting from their native Italy, speak with an American accent? I realize “because she’s played by Nancy Walker, who was Rhoda’s mother” isn’t a good answer, but it’s the one I’m going with. (Betty White had been on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as well, playing a character not unlike Blanche.) Why does Rose refer to her traditional language as “Scandinavian,” and why is the language itself complete nonsense? Who cares, it means you can get merch printed with “gerflokennokkin.”
Indeed, the show lives on as much in kitschy gear as in the episodes themselves. My local Toronto pharmacy was recently selling mugs with the “girls” and their catchphrases. A gift shop had a Golden Girls colouring book in the window. A man on the streetcar carried a tote bag proclaiming the crew “The Real Housewives of Shady Pines,” a crossover reference to the reality-TV franchise and the retirement community where Dorothy once banished Sophia.
Likely because of the knick-knacks, prior to watching The Golden Girls, I’d always thought of the show as cozy. So I was surprised to see how cruel the characters are to one another. Rose is called an idiot at every turn. Blanche is spoken of, to her face, as a disease-ridden “slut” – this in a show that is also, confusingly, sensitive when discussing HIV. Dorothy has no social life and is too tall to get a date. (Too short, too tall, can’t win.)
If you watch it with your problematicness-detecting hat on, you will spot things that wouldn’t go over well today. There are weird moments regarding race, and no shortage of insinuations that southern Italians are mobsters and Minnesotans of Scandinavian origin are all dimwitted fools. But such things are more datedness than malice, and exist in the context of a show that was far ahead of the curve on feminism, gay acceptance and more. As with All in the Family (which Bea Arthur had been on), we’re in a fictional world that depicts bigotry in order to denounce it, an approach that has fallen out of fashion in recent years, but that shouldn’t be conflated with hateful content itself.
The only consistently unsettling thing is the way they talk about weight, which they do incessantly. Much is made of Blanche’s (alluded-to; I don’t see it) weight gain, with a gag about how some man is attracted to her because he has a thing for fat women. There’s even an end-of-season recap episode where they reminisce about diets past. None of this is, as with other seeming offensiveness, actually in service of an anti-fat-shaming message. It very much is as it looks.
It’s hard to watch, but an accurate depiction of how middle-class urban white women like that would have spoken at that time. The late 1980s and early 1990s were more heroin-chic than body-positivity. These were years when women spoke of eating dessert as being bad. Slim women, like those on the show, struggled to be thinner still, and it wasn’t often questioned whether this was the most productive use of time. That said, there’s something refreshing about the bluntness with which they discuss dieting (which has gone nowhere, just been euphemized as “wellness” or rendered obsolete by Ozempic) and, for that matter, wanting boyfriends, another thing women still do but with more hedging and handwringing.
The Golden Girls is often reclaimed – and was, while still airing, claimed – as a gay cultural icon. There are many reasons why, some obvious (the episodes where a character comes out as gay and the “girls” accept them) to more abstract ones having to do with aesthetics and sensibility. In Out magazine, pop culture writer Michael Musto wrote: “The real reason why gay guys have always responded so feverishly to the show: the Golden Girls are basically gay men in dresses!”
Everyone gets to interpret art as they see fit. Particularly in eras with less gay representation, a “basically gay men” interpretation was a way for gay men to see themselves onscreen. And if a gay man writes a line spoken by a straight woman character – relevant for Sex and the City as well, another show said to be covertly about gay men – or even if not, the result can be a hybrid product of sorts. Sitcom characters are artistic creations, so they don’t really have gender identities or sexual orientations in the way that human beings do. Viewers who see Blanche or Sex and the City’s Samantha or Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, another great sitcom with a debt to The Golden Girls, as somehow gay-man-like are picking up on something.
But it does seem worth re-reclaiming The Golden Girls as a show about straight women. Not to refute gay interpretations; art (sitcoms are art) can be multiple things at once. The Golden Girls – created by a straight (at least, man-marrying) woman, Susan Harris – offers portraits of female heterosexuality that are otherwise not so easy to find. The show is celebrated for depicting an all-female household, but these are women who form crushes on men, who go places hoping to meet men, who enjoy dining with men and sometimes (particularly if their name is Blanche) taking these men home. And this all comes across as real – not realist, but true-to-life. You don’t have to imagine that the women are gay men for it to make sense.
The life stage represented no longer exists as such. Here are women with grown children and grandchildren, but they’re the age of today’s equivalent-milieu elementary school moms because they had their kids at 20ish and not 40ish. They lead lives unfettered by domesticity not because they’re subversive but because their homemaking days are behind them. All of them did the conventional nuclear-family thing, interrupted only by widowhood – or in Dorothy’s case, divorce.
The Golden Girls defies gendered expectations not by rejecting heterosexuality but by depicting women being sexual even after aging out of hotness. Or, rather, out of conventional hotness. There are younger men into older women, as well as men for whom a woman in her 50s would be a younger woman. Presumably there were men into Dr. Ruth, who married three times. But few men tune into Golden Girls for ogling purposes. The show’s refusal to cater to a straight male gaze is part of what lends it to gay-coded readings. But the core gaze is that of thirsty female heterosexuals.
The best episode of the entire series is the one where they’re all set to meet heartthrob actor Burt Reynolds at a film premiere. If you put together the year of the episode (1986) and the age of the ladies, it’s clear why he’d be on their radars: in 1972, he was Cosmopolitan magazine’s first male centrefold.
Blanche insists they first stop for drinks at a hotel with many male guests. Little do they know, it’s a pick-up joint favoured by sex workers, a profession the men at the bar assume they share. One of the men asks Dorothy how long she’s been working. She has no idea he means working and answers the question with her employment history as a substitute teacher.
There’s a police raid, and the silliness of anyone imagining these women sell sex for a living – Sophia makes a crack about anyone thinking men would buy this from them – switches over to the higher-stakes absurdity of them being in a cell with women who are the real deal. They’re upset by this partly because who wants to be locked up, but also since it means they’re missing Burt Reynolds.
Sophia, who’d been excluded from the original outing, is therefore not behind bars and attends in their stead. We hear about this at the end of the episode, once they’re home. If you’ve seen sitcoms before, you can sense a cameo coming, and sure enough, Sophia has become fast friends with Mr. Reynolds, who swings by to pick her up for lunch. Sophia has already told him about her roommates, so he asks her, quietly, “Which one’s the slut?” All three raise their hands and say, in unison, “I am.”