The Golden Girls: 10 Not So Great Things About a Great Show

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Weirdy Way Media, Eighties.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
And So Pretty Through the City The money Man World.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
Hello eighties TV ladies listeners, Welcome to the podcast set
looks back in order to leap forward. Here are your hosts,
Susan Lambert had Him and Sharon Johnson.

Speaker 4 (00:37):
Hello. I'm Susan and I'm Sharon.

Speaker 5 (00:39):
Now we are a joy filled podcast and almost always
look on the bright side of things.

Speaker 4 (00:45):
But sometimes it's good to acknowledge how far we've come
and how far we have to go, and that for
every silver lining, there is a cloud.

Speaker 5 (00:54):
We're currently exploring the Golden Girls, and we have so
many great things to say about it, but we all
so I want to acknowledge that nothing's perfect, and that
includes the Golden Girls.

Speaker 4 (01:04):
Gasps Sharon. Okay, So you can listen to our fun
facts and fabulous guests, but we also wanted to make
sure we talk about things that might not be so great,
because truth and reconciliation will set us free. Absolutely. We
have to take the good and the bad, the facts
of life, and there you have the facts of life.

(01:26):
So I'm thinking we should call this the ten things
I Hate about the Golden Girls. I don't know, do
you do? We like that title. Well I did until
you said you didn't like that much.

Speaker 5 (01:39):
Well I'm thinking, what about ten not so great things
about the Golden Girls. I just feel like hate is
a little bit too strong.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
Okay, okay, So ten things maybe we don't love about
the Golden Girls. Again, we're going to do five each.
We're going to pass it off and back and forth,
adding up to ten.

Speaker 5 (01:56):
And while The Golden Girls was groundbreaking and talk thoughtfully
about hot button topics from aids to race, to menopause
to women and queer rights.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
It also got a few things wrong. We love the ladies,
you know that Dorothy, Blanche Rose, and Sophia truly the
Golden eighties TV ladies. But just like they did on
the show, we can also throw a little snark in
at things that we don't like.

Speaker 5 (02:21):
And just to provide proper acknowledgment, we want to indicate
that this topic was inspired by a Vulture article on
The Golden Girls by Stephen W.

Speaker 4 (02:31):
Thrasher, which was very cool. Like when we go looking
for research things, we find really cool things, and you
found this one and it sort of shifted a lot
of my perception of the show. So here are the
ten things we don't love about the Golden Girls. I'm
kind of liking that you're liking that. Yeah, okay, So first,

(02:54):
the Golden Girls could be mean spirited, very mean spirited.
The writers made a lot of jokes about Dorothy being
ugly and too tall and manly, and really everyone made
jokes about how dumb Rose was. Sophia was mean, and
they were mean to her, left her behind on all
sorts of things that made me sad. They were a

(03:14):
couple episodes where they're like, you're staying home, We're going
out to have fun, meet Burt Reynolds or whatever it was,
you know. Be Arthur's character. Dorothy is often the target
of jokes, and then her sarcastic comments are also very mean,
like she's like, it's weird. Everybody got an opportunity to
be mean, you know, except for Rose probably, But I

(03:37):
thought it sometimes could be cruel or overdone. I remember
being like, whoa, they're snarking in a way that sometimes
is too much for me. But it was like that
was television sitcoms in the eighties. Mama's family married with
children all in the family. Like seventies and eighties families
could also be mean.

Speaker 5 (03:58):
But tone, and it's a balance sometimes that they don't
always get quite right. That in some episodes all of
those things we've just mentioned, they managed to get it
in there in a way that was not jarring or
borderline or even over the line offensive. And then there

(04:20):
were some episodes where they went too far or maybe
didn't go far enough to find that balance. And that's
really what we're talking about when it comes to this so.

Speaker 4 (04:30):
And speaking about the second fact is that for all
its feminism, and it's pretty amazing there are for women
of a certain age and it's all focused on them
and their conversation, some episodes could be surprisingly sexist and
have a weird moments of minds. The biggest, I think
is the basically them ignoring what sounds like actual rape

(04:52):
in the episode they make jokes about it, especially date rape.
Dorothy's tale of how she and her husband in together
basically implies that he slipped her something and had sex
with her without protection and she gets knocked up. When
they were young, she was unconscious, she was unconscious, she says,
she's not conscious. It's weird. And then another time, like

(05:15):
Sophia talks about how like you know, oh well, you know, men,
they want to have sex with you, whether you're awake
or asleep, and you're like, what is happening to these ladies?
It's not okay, and they don't really acknowledge that it's
you know, again, it's told as a joke almost, which
is a little bit odd. You feel like someone wants
to take an intervention and go hold on now.

Speaker 5 (05:37):
But that said, that was a lot of the mindset
at that time. So at that time, I'm not excusing it,
believe me, but at that time that that was what
a lot of people, more people thought than certainly now
more people. Most people, i'd like to think understand that

(05:58):
what they were joking about was really no joke. But yeah,
so that was one of the things where at times
it was kind of like, okay, maybe not so much
of that.

Speaker 4 (06:10):
Yeah, And the way she tells it, she clearly doesn't
see herself as a victim, right from we're all like,
oh my god, let's get let's get Dorothy into some
therapy quick.

Speaker 5 (06:22):
Also, though this show could be progressive for the time,
as I'm sure the nineties TV babies will point out,
it was also very white, very quote other people are
scary close quote, very sis it has deep roots about
gold digging older women.

Speaker 4 (06:39):
So yeah, so Brandon Tartakoff. The other sort of inspiration
was How to Marry a Millionaire, a movie that came
out that he saw, and so that was part of
the thing of like, originally it was going to be
like these older women sort of gold digging in Miami
a little bit, and then the sweeter side of that
came out, and then Susan Harris got a hold of
it and it became about something else. But those were

(07:01):
the two inspirations that are talked about often for Brandon
Tartakoff to want this show, and I think sometimes that
is there, right.

Speaker 5 (07:12):
Yeah, And just to clarify, Brandon Tartakoff was the president
of ABC Entertainment at that time, so he would have
been the one that said, yes, we're going to make
the show.

Speaker 4 (07:20):
Or no, we're not going to make it, right, and
he was thrown out. I mean, it's felt like he
was really like, hey, I want a show that's like this, right,
and so he was really not always presidents were doing that,
but he was, yeah, absolutely, yeah. You know this is
also surprisingly as we go through some of these episodes,
a show that could be racist towards black people, towards

(07:42):
other cultures. There's some appropriation of Indigenous Americans. There's some
cringey moments with their queer and disability episodes. Again, it's
trying something. It's not always successful. It's trying to have
these conversations, not always successful, but some of those episodes

(08:03):
are really some. I mean, I think the one that
they call the Blackface episode, the Mixed Blessings is available
streaming or not available streaming. It feels like it might
have been pulled in some areas.

Speaker 5 (08:17):
Yeah, I'm not sure entirely. I'm sure it's on the
DVDs if you can find them, and it may or
may not be in rotation on some of the streaming channels.
But I'm sure you could find it if you really.

Speaker 4 (08:29):
But it's surprising when you see it in a show
that you expect is going to be so mindful.

Speaker 5 (08:37):
But at the same time, that particular moment in Mixed
Blessings that you refer to to me came off more
as a joke. They were trying to tell that they
didn't quite get there with it. And as with all
of this that we're talking about again, I think we
have to give it a little bit of grace because

(08:59):
they were at least trying to go there, and they
were at least trying to be better, more inclusive about
some of these things. And sometimes it worked really well
and sometimes it didn't.

Speaker 4 (09:12):
But you know, having the conversation is awkward. Yeah, right, absolutely,
so you're going to get it wrong, right. So that's
one of the lessons of the last forty to fifty
hundred years what exactly, that it's important to have the conversations.
It's important to know that you might be wrong and
to be able to be corrected and to be able

(09:34):
to be open to a continued conversation.

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Right.

Speaker 4 (09:37):
So again, you got to give it props for that.
I am sometimes surprised because I just sort of assume
it's going to be great with all of these things,
because it's great with so many other conversations. But it's not.

Speaker 5 (09:51):
And I think part of that could be because of
the schedule crunch, the fact that they don't you never
have enough time to get it things to where you
want it to be. Some things are easier to get
in the right place than others, and at some point
they have to stop writing and go, Okay, we're going
to shoot this and that applies to all the episodes,

(10:13):
whether they have you know, some context that has to
do with some of the more social issues or not.
Every episode of any show is not going to be
the best that it can be. Some of them are
just not going to work well.

Speaker 4 (10:28):
And I think I also want to acknowledge that during
the run of The Golden Girls, Susan Harris, who created
the show and wrote many, many, many of the episodes,
struggled with chronic fatigue, and she actually wrote an episode
about it, chronic fatigue syndrome. You know, everybody in television

(10:49):
works themselves to a degree of exhaustion, but clearly when
she was missing, I think some of that really insightful
stuff was missing. But also she's one person, so she
can't all the conversations right right.

Speaker 5 (11:02):
So next on the list is that Blanche's Southern bell
had a lot of dog whistles. For instance, she's from
a plantation.

Speaker 4 (11:12):
That is insane to me. I'm from the South, and
I didn't notice it the first time when I watched
the show in the eighties, But watching it now, I'm like,
oh my god, like, because nobody lived on a plantation
south from the eighties. It's insane. So there is there's
a lot of dog whistles in Blanche and you're like, hmm,

(11:37):
but they're also, what does that mean? Dog whistle? I
have no idea what that means. Hey, do you need
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Speaker 4 (12:53):
Oh that's interesting. Like it's basically a phrase that means
you're saying something, and if you listen closely, it's it's
telling people who are racist, it's giving them some cover.
It's like coding. It's coding. Well, I took it. Take
it a little bit differently.

Speaker 5 (13:12):
To me, the dog whistle is an indication that this
person or whatever this person is saying, is giving an explanation,
giving context to something that whether they know it or not,
because I think a lot of times they really don't

(13:33):
think about it that way. That has some bigotry there
behind it. That again that they or.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
The dog whistle is silent unless you know, yes to
listen for it.

Speaker 4 (13:46):
Yeah, so it's a political message intended for and often
only understood by particular group. For instance, there seems to
be a lot of that in certain there's Nazi coding
of certain things everywhere everywhere. So it's yeah, it's sort

(14:09):
of it can't be seen by everybody because it could
you could go, oh, but they just mean this, right,
it's the it's the it's how the language shifted from
you know, from actual racist language, outwardly racist language, to
things like urban. You know, it's how it's how all

(14:32):
Southern politics became in nineteen sixty four. Urban is.

Speaker 5 (14:36):
The use of the term urban is a perfect example,
because some people hear it as simply just meeting people
who live in cities. Other people hear it, and whether
they're conscious of it or not, they hear it as
a place where.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
Minorities live.

Speaker 5 (14:56):
And as a result, it's crime rithen, it's this, you know,
it's all these it has all these negative connotations, and
that's the dog whistle of it.

Speaker 4 (15:04):
So law and order being the the you know, were
for law and order being the you know, sort of
the welfare crank queens of uh, you know, all all
that language that was happening in the eighties and the
and now is still there. Is is there? And I again,

(15:26):
I was lucky enough to grow up sort of in
the in the umbrella of the Civil rights movement and
the Civil Rights Act, and in that time when people
were at least proclaiming the desire to be equal and
to be non racist, maybe without all the language that

(15:48):
we have now, but where I was like, oh, this
is what we're doing now right, I completely I would
miss some of that until it's pointed out to me.
You know, Southern politics are very famous. AnyWho Okay, now
I know, now we know, but that every once in
a while Blanche cringes me thank you all right? Where

(16:10):
we oh me? Oh yes number six? Okay. While they
fought agism with the show, they also used it. They
leave Sophia. I said this before, in the mean part.
They leave Sophia behind so many times. They judge people
and relationships on their own ages on each other. But
they also have discussions that weren't on TV at the time.

(16:30):
So there's the same thing where they're trying to have
discussions about things and sometimes it comes off a little cringey.

Speaker 5 (16:35):
Now, next, the characters were written in very broad stereotypes
that did not evolve. They may evolve in the episode,
but not over the course of the show, not really.
Blanche is the man hungry Southern bell. For instance, Rose
is the ditzy blonde, and Sophia is the stereotypical, feisty
joke telling old lady one dimensional. The characters are often

(16:59):
reverting to their default personalities after a life lesson is learned.
All true and all I think is just in some
ways the result of episodic television, and.

Speaker 4 (17:13):
It comes of the day.

Speaker 5 (17:14):
Yeah, and the fact that the people that make these shows,
thanks to their research, know that not everybody watched every episode.
In fact, most people did not. I watched every episode,
but you know that's me. We love TV, that's right,
And probably most of you listening watched every episode, but
not everybody does. So if you have something change with

(17:36):
a character and the person hasn't somebody hasn't watched a
few episodes, they don't understand how they got from point
A to point B all the time.

Speaker 4 (17:43):
So they have a tendency to not have.

Speaker 5 (17:47):
The lesson learned carryover too far forward.

Speaker 4 (17:53):
Because of that, there's always a reset, Yeah, for early sitcoms,
for seventies, eighties, even ninety sitcoms, there's a reset. There's
some that aren't, some half hour comedies that don't do that,
and people do kind of move forward and change and
stuff like that. But this was a quintessential sitcom where
the reset happened. People might learn something, but it doesn't

(18:15):
necessarily come up again.

Speaker 5 (18:17):
And it doesn't happen nearly as much now, mainly because
so many shows are serialized. There are fewer and fewer
shows that are episodic. You know, you get a ten
episode show and it tells a story from start to finish,
so things are changing constantly for characters as you go
from episode one to episode ten, and they pull all
of that information along the way.

Speaker 4 (18:40):
And they didn't do that.

Speaker 5 (18:41):
They didn't do that then they don't do it now
with most episodic television.

Speaker 4 (18:45):
Absolutely yeah, and just like uh, episodic television of the
time and sitcoms even now. The laugh track in particular
for this show is pretty prominent. Again, we watch eighties
TV shows and there are laugh tracks for some reason,
this one everyone while throws me off a little bit
more than some others. But it's a sitcom. But it's

(19:07):
one of those things where we're like, wow that sometimes
it's not really matching what's happening next, consistent inconsistency.

Speaker 5 (19:17):
They play really loose with their facts, which a lot
of eighties TV shows did. But for Deep Divers many
of the names, dates and facts change. But that was
a lot of shows from the nineteen eighties other than
you know, reruns, we were, yes, it was, but not
everything got rerun. Not everything again, reruns did not happen

(19:37):
in order. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 4 (19:40):
All right. Well, and the final ten thing that I
hate or we don't love about the show is the
for me, or actually for both of us, I think
the loss of Coco played by Charles Levin. I feel
like he could have become and should have become a
recurring character. We should have been ableately see Coco a
couple of times a season and remain a friend because

(20:04):
that would have been fun.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (20:06):
Absolutely, So that's one thing I'm like, they just dropped
him like a hot potato that I didn't like that.

Speaker 5 (20:13):
Not the first time and not the last time that's
happened to what may have been kind of a fun character.
So and the bonus thing that not so fun. Fact,
if I want a bonus not so fun, Yeah, I
think we need one. The Golden Girls is no longer
on the air, and we've lost all of the ladies
of the Golden Girls, and that that's something I'm not

(20:36):
really happy about.

Speaker 4 (20:37):
Either me either. That's our love hate. Yes, exactly. The show.
I feel like it should have had a reboot. I
almost am afraid of a reboot now, I'm terrified. I
am terrified of a reboot. So the time that it
should have had a reboot in some ways has passed
for me because I am afraid, but I that is

(21:01):
a show that I think we would enjoy getting more of. Absolutely.
I mean, I think one of the things that makes.

Speaker 5 (21:08):
The possibility of a reboot successful is having as many
of the behind the scenes folks involved as possible, because
they know the show and they know better most of
the time how to make it work. So I don't know. Then,
sadly most of the folks involved have all passed away

(21:30):
and or retired. Yeah, so so you know, maybe it's
just as well. And to me at this point, leave
the Golden Girls alone.

Speaker 4 (21:39):
They're fine as they are. Make the Golden Girls whine,
sell the pillows run and the cheesecake candles. There you go,
Disney printing their Golden Girls money. It is funny that
Disney ended up with the Golden Girls. I mean, I
guess they had it. Yeah, yeah, they had it.

Speaker 5 (21:56):
They had it from the beginning.

Speaker 4 (21:57):
So all right, Well, those were the ten things we
don't love about the Golden Girls. What are yours? If
you have any let us know. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (22:06):
Yeah, As always, we love to hear from from uh
from our listeners go to Eightiestvladies dot.

Speaker 4 (22:11):
Com or email us at eight zero s t V
l A d I E s dot com. That's it.
Oh oh no, I'm sorry I did it wrong. No,
you Delia L A d I E s at gmail
dot com. Well, you gave the website first. I gave
the website first. That one I did right. That's right. Okay.

Speaker 5 (22:33):
So as we close. In today's audioography, you can read
the Vulture article that started us down this path. It
was from twenty twenty and it was called the Real
Mud on Golden Girls, written by Stephen W. Thrasher.

Speaker 4 (22:52):
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Speaker 5 (23:57):
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Speaker 4 (24:16):
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Speaker 5 (24:26):
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us all. So with that, as always, we hope ads
TV Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of
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Speaker 4 (24:47):
Thanks everyone, Thank you.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
So pretty. Through the city, nothing trained, getting working hard
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