The Golden Girls

The Golden Girls, American television sitcom created by writer and producer Susan Harris that aired on the NBC network from 1985 to 1992. The series follows four older women living together as roommates in Miami. The Golden Girls was acclaimed for its positive portrayal of older women and female friendship and for the strong ensemble acting and comedic skills of its four lead actresses.

Premise and characters

The show’s pilot episode features three middle-aged women sharing a home in Miami: the widowed Rose Nylund (played by Betty White), widowed Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan), and divorced Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur). Rose, who grew up on a farm in Minnesota, is sweet but naive. Southern belle Blanche, who owns the home that the others share with her, is “man-hungry” and self-absorbed. Brooklyn native Dorothy is witty and sarcastic and works as a teacher. The three women are soon joined by Dorothy’s Italian American mother, the straight-talking Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty), a stroke survivor whose retirement home has just burned down. The pilot episode also featured a younger, male, live-in housekeeper character named Coco (Charles Levin), but the show’s creators decided to make Sophia, originally written as a minor character, a permanent part of the main cast. Coco never appeared on the show again after the pilot episode.

As the series continued, much of the show’s humor derived from the women’s frank conversations about aging, men, sex, widowhood, divorce, and family. Many episodes show the women gathered around the kitchen table swapping stories about their life experiences and trading barbs at each other’s expense regarding their perceived flaws and sore spots: Rose’s general cluelessness, Blanche’s vanity and promiscuity, Dorothy’s cheating ex-husband, and Sophia’s lack of a verbal filter. However, the women’s closeness and camaraderie always shine through their jokes and quarrels.

Recurring characters throughout the series include Dorothy’s ex-husband Stanley (Herb Edelman), Rose’s steadfast suitor Miles (Harold Gould), and the women’s adult children and siblings. The show’s popularity was such that it eventually featured guest appearances by many celebrities, playing themselves or original characters, including Don Ameche, Sonny Bono, Ruby Dee, Bob Hope, Rita Moreno, Leslie Nielsen, Burt Reynolds, Debbie Reynolds, Mickey Rooney, Alex Trebek, and Dick Van Dyke. The show also boasted appearances by some of television’s finest character actors, such as Gordon Jump, Hal Linden, Jerry Orbach, Cesar Romero, McLean Stevenson, Brenda Vaccaro, and Nancy Walker, as well as early-career appearances by actors who went on to great success, notably George Clooney and Mario Lopez.

Series creator and cast

Before The Golden Girls, Harris had created the hit shows Soap (1977–81) and Benson (1979–86) and had written for the sitcom Maude (1972–78), which also starred Arthur. Harris’s writing for Maude included a groundbreaking episode in which the title character unexpectedly becomes pregnant at age 47 and decides to have an abortion. The idea for The Golden Girls was pitched to Harris by her husband, Paul Junger Witt, and Tony Thomas, who had both been hired by NBC to produce a show about older women set in Miami. The proposed show was described as “Miami Nice” (in contrast to NBC’s popular crime drama series Miami Vice [1984–89]), although NBC president Brandon Tartikoff told the producers he wanted the women characters to be “feisty as hell and having a great time.” The pitch appealed to Harris, she later said, because it gave her an opportunity to create passionate older women characters with rich stories to tell.

The Golden Girls benefited from a strong ensemble cast of veteran stage and television actresses skilled at comic delivery. Arthur’s previous sitcom experience included All in the Family (1971–79) as well as Maude (1972–78). White’s first major television role was in the sitcom Life with Elizabeth (1952–55), and she had been a favorite celebrity panelist on many game shows in the 1960s and ’70s. She had also been a regular on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), playing the devious Sue Ann Nivens. McClanahan had acted on television in the soap opera Another World (1964–99) from 1970–71 as well as on Maude (1972–78) and on the Carol Burnett and Vicki Lawrence sitcom Mama’s Family (1983–90). Getty had a long career in theater with some minor parts in television and film before landing the role of Sophia when she was in her 60s.

Accolades, camp appeal, and legacy

The Golden Girls was an immediate hit with audiences and critics. It was one of the first sitcoms to include stories about certain topics considered taboo, such as menopause, ageism, job discrimination, immigration, sexual harassment, death, Alzheimer disease, chronic pain, and assisted suicide. Its characters were complex, active, and engaging, which was seen as a welcome change from negative caricatures of older adults as doddering or cantankerous. The show also gained a large viewership among LGBTQ audiences, partly because several episodes addressed queer themes and issues such as same-sex relationships and the AIDS crisis.

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The Golden Girls also captured a distinct 1980s-era Florida aesthetic that was a major part of its charm and camp appeal, featuring soft pastel colors, rattan and floral print furniture, permed hairstyles, and layered outfits accessorized with formidable shoulder pads, cardigans, and blazers. Its catchy theme song, performed by Cynthia Fee, is an abbreviated version of Andrew Gold’s 1978 single “Thank You for Being a Friend.”

The show received 68 Emmy Award nominations during its seven-year run. It won twice for outstanding comedy series (1986 and 1987) and picked up three awards for technical direction (1986, 1988, and 1992) and one Emmy each for writing (1986) and directing (1987). The Emmy for outstanding actress in a comedy series was awarded to White in 1986, to McClanahan in 1987, and to Arthur in 1988. Getty won the Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in 1988. A spin-off series, Empty Nest, debuted in 1988 and ran until 1995.

The Golden Girls ended its run in 1992 with a finale episode about Dorothy’s remarriage. Another spin-off series premiered that same year, The Golden Palace (1992–93), featuring Blanche, Rose, and Sophia carrying on without Dorothy, but the show lasted only one season. The original series has remained enormously popular with audiences through syndication and, later, streaming.