Golden Girls: Classic or Dud?

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.