Golden Girls: Classic or Dud?

Oral history.

The Golden Girls puppet show runs through Dec. 11 at DR2 Theatre

http://dlisted.com/2016/10/03/open-post-hosted-by-the-only-thing-i-want-for-christmas/

maybe you want this for Christmas too

https://twitter.com/keithuhlich/status/811685290305789952

Golden Girls Clue

Bea doll appears to be throwing the gaze she did after knocking over Allyzay

http://mentalfloss.com/article/551922/the-golden-girls-action-figures-neca-comic-con

Now in cereal form!

https://thetakeout.com/share-this-golden-girls-cereal-with-a-pal-or-a-confidan-1829974755

I tasted a piece. It was dry and tasteless.

like ILX wit

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-09/1/10/enhanced/webdr08/anigif_enhanced-32687-1441116940-14.gif

https://media.giphy.com/media/tcXc0LOuZcGzK/giphy.gif

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4tN2MCoJ9K0/WzTcT_rdTEI/AAAAAAAAjVY/qQFQ8zYPCacughpdEYSJVT9nAb557HWNQCLcBGAs/s400/giphy.gif

there's a whole bunch of them, here is the second roll out

https://www.funko.com/blog/article/coming-soon-funkos-cereal-wave-2

luv u Elaine Stritch

Stritch entered a room of black suits. “I hope you all don’t mind that I’ve rewritten some of these lines to fit me,” she told them. “I’m Catholic, so I don’t want to say, ‘oh God.’ I can’t stand that.” She tried a curse instead. The suits stared back at her, aghast.

“I’m just glad I got out of there alive,” Stritch said years later. “I hate that show. Who’d be crazy enough to live in Florida with two other women and their mother?”

“For me to work with Betty White every day would be like taking cyanide.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/theater/elaine-stritch-broadway-roles.html

https://variety.com/2002/film/columns/stritch-almost-a-golden-girl-1117860373/

Classic. Both Stritch and the Golden Girls. I’m glad she botched that audition.

https://imgur.com/8eEhf3I

just leaving this here

https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/the-real-mud-on-golden-girls.html

It's really wild how the only difference between a "zoomer shocked to find piece of old media problematic" clickbait article and "Northwestern professor wrestles with TV show that's been off the air for 25 years" is peppering your piece with "As epidemiologist Julia Marcus explains"

No surprise that a sitcom from the 80s would be full of questionable material. I think we even discussed some of its hypocritical queer affirmation above, so no need to re-litigate that; the racial stuff works much the same way (pleas for tolerance on one hand, scoring easy punchlines on the other) but Sophia's many racist/homo- and trans-phobic zings are generally shown to be embarrassing to her daughter (yes, I know, the audience still gets to laugh).

Re: the rape--the show's notorious inconsistency complicates things a little bit, I think, in that we are given so many versions of Michael's conception that it is hard to take any one of them as definitive. In the case of "he must have slipped me something," I'm willing to read this variant on the story--which generally sets up a joke about Stan's lack of sexual prowess and/or Dorothy's insecurity--as a convenient set up to a punchline ("Apparently!"). More to the point, the kind of date rape scenario proposed in this scene likely would not have been uncommon mid-twentieth-century, and would have resulted in a young woman marrying her abuser and carrying around the "shame" of it (I once had a similar combination re: Biff's attempted rape of Lorraine in Back to the Future). If it is shitty of the series to make light of this, I'd argue that there is enough pathos in Dorothy's character (and Bea Arthur's performance) that the viewer isn't unconscious of it.

i find contemporary culture full of questionable material

Good calls, crypto. (Also, the series has tons of fat jokes and low blows about Dorothy's looks that are impossible to overlook. Still my favorite sitcom.)

the series has tons of fat jokes

Have Oliver Hardy and Jackie Gleason been cancelled yet?

Fatty Arbuckle sure was.

never found guilty in 3 trials

A prince of a man, then.

But thanks for willfully overlooking the point.

Really good piece.

Saw a couple of episodes of this the other day and they were not very good. One of the storylines was about the possibility that Estelle Getty was not Bea Arthur's real mother and that's when I realized they're supposed to be Italian - the fear of having actual Jewish characters writ large.

designing women is better anyway

You take that back!

XD

One of the storylines was about the possibility that Estelle Getty was not Bea Arthur's real mother

IIRC that's a later season episode. Even a lot of die-hard fans have their issues with the last couple seasons.

That episode sucks.

Some gems in the later seasons: I love the murder mystery weekend, Dorothy singing "What'll I Do," and Alan King as Mel Bushman. But yeah, it was definitely where the show's famously sloppy writing got even more ridiculous.

On a GG recap podcast I used to listen to until I realized I couldn't stand one of the hosts anymore, one of their guests made the bold assertion that he preferred the later seasons for their "more flexible sense of reality." Which I took to mean, yes, sloppiness.

But yes, the "What'll I Do" ep is top 3.

That's the same reaction some fans have about the last couple Rosanne episodes

Yes, but which series had more indefensible fat jokes?

The Cosby Show.

At the same time, Golden Girls had more punchlines about The Cosby Show than The Cosby Show had indefensible fat jokes.

I prefer the latter seasons of Seinfeld because of their more flexible sense of reality.

btw all silent film buffs now call Fatty Arbuckle "Roscoe" (as his colleagues did)

I wish that more film buffs were silent.

disappointed that a ctrl+f for "rattan" yields zero (0) results itt

we're all disappointed in life from time to time, but we find the hope to carry on.

Oh please, it’s wicker.

I saw a bumper sticker for “St. Olaf College”; took a pic and sent it to my wife, thinking it was a GG joke… she was like, “Yeah, that’s a real school.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/theater/tituss-burgess-moulin-rouge.html

Those four ladies and the writers together made television magic. It’s like a fine wine: The jokes somehow are even funnier now, or I’m just getting older and maybe I understand the references a little more. On some level, every creator can reference it as a source of inspiration. For me, TV’s never been funnier.