Whenever the topic of discussion is great American sitcoms, you can bet your bottom dollar three titles will always be mentioned right at the top: Cheers, Frasier (which, of course, was a spin-off of Cheers) and Friends.
Now and again someone might mention Taxi, which turned Danny DeVito, who played mean-spirited dispatcher Louie De Palma, from a jobbing character actor into a star and gave Andy Kaufman the biggest mainstream television exposure of his career.
But mostly it’s those first three. And deservedly so. All of them were in their own very different ways brilliant: high-water marks of US television comedy’s writers’ room system, an approach to making sitcoms that British television, especially, has tried and failed to copy a number of times over the years.
As someone who loves all of the above series and has a particular fondness for studio-based sitcoms recorded in front of a live audience (a format smug hipsters will tell you is hopelessly outdated, yet which has a remarkable habit of bouncing back), it’s always baffled me why The Golden Girls isn’t mentioned in the same breath.
It’s not like it’s one of those short-lived series that fails to attract an audience first time around, only to acquire a devoted cult following years after it went off air.
The Golden Girls, created by Susan Harris (Soap, Benson), was huge from its opening episode in 1985 and remained so right up to its seventh and final season in 1992.
More than 23 million viewers in the US tuned in for the last ever episode, an hour-long special.
So how come it doesn’t seem to get the same recognition as the sitcoms mentioned above? I’m guessing it’s to do with visibility.
Cheers and Frasier, which is getting a revival next year, are continually repeated in the mornings and afternoons on Channel 4.
Friends is on television more now than it was when it was brand new. Switch on Comedy Central any day of the week and you can wallow in six or seven straight hours of it. It’s also on Netflix.
The Golden Girls has never had that kind of platform. Until now. All 180 episodes were added to Disney+ last Friday (the series was produced by the now defunct Disney subsidiary Touchstone, which made TV shows and films aimed at the non-kiddie audience), and all of them are as riotously funny now as when they first aired. It’s 24-carat comedy gold that hasn’t lost its lustre at all.
The series focuses on four older women sharing a house in Miami: Brooklyn-born divorcee Dorothy Zbornak (glorious Bea Arthur, who had an unmatched way with a deadpan quip); naive Norwegian-American widow Rose Nylund (Betty White, the only one of the four stars still living), whose bizarre stories about her upbringing in the town of St Olaf, Minnesota, were a hilarious recurring feature; highly-sexed Southern belle Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan), whose man-eating ways made her namesake, Blanche Dubois from A Streetcar Named Desire, seem like a closeted nun, and octogenarian Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty), Dorothy’s Sicily-born mother, who moves in after a fire destroys the retirement home she lived in.
Ironically, Getty was 62, just two years younger than Bea Arthur, when the show started and had to spend 45 minutes in the make-up chair to age her by two decades.
The Golden Girls fulfills the primary objective of comedy: it’s hilarious.
The scripts give the stars, who are simply terrific, an equal share of the zingers that fly around like ping-pong balls, and they hit the target every single time.
But it also manages to be about something. If a sitcom centred on four women, ranging in age from 50-something to 80-something, was a rarity in the 1980s (it probably wouldn’t even get made now), rarer still was a primetime network show that tackled subjects like homosexuality, same-sex marriage, assisted dying, elder care, HIV/Aids, homelessness, interracial marriage and painkiller addiction.
It did all of these things, sensitively and intelligently, without ever once sacrificing the comedy for the message.
If you’ve never seen The Golden Girls, then
get streaming and lose yourself in a literal golden age of US TV comedy.