The Golden Girls is a show that, no matter who you are, it’s hard to have avoided throughout your life. Not to say that you really want to have avoided it, but if you did want to, it wouldn’t have been that easy, because it is very heavily syndicated. Somehow every time I’m taking a nap, I wake up and it turns out I fell asleep while watching The Golden Girls, which is strange because I don’t typically watch the Hallmark Channel or TV Land. I actually suspect that my roommate is playing a trick on me.
I think the thing that makes The Golden Girls appealing is that it has just the right mix of bland, safe, tame 90’s network TV humor mixed with just enough sarcasm, by way of Maude and Sophia, to make it bearable.
There are a couple of interesting tidbits worth mentioning here. First, this show may have had the fewest setting changes per episode of any show made after 1985. In the early days of TV, it was common for there to be only one, or maybe two or three settings used in a given episode – think of episodes of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. In the 80’s and 90’s, though, shows tended to have four or more settings in each episode minimum. Think of an episode of Seinfeld, for example (which did for a time run concurrently with the Golden Girls), which took place in Jerry’s apartment, the coffee shop, Elaine’s office, the street, and any number of other places depending on the situations in each episode. In The Golden Girls, on the other hand, no matter what was happening, the episode took place in either their living room or kitchen the vast majority of the time. There were definitely episodes (I just watched one to confirm) in which nothing the audience sees takes place outside of the house.
The other fun fact I want to mention here is that Estelle Getty, who played Sophia, was actually a year younger than Bea Arthur, who played Maude, even though in the show Sophia is Maude’s mother.
If this post has made you feel like watching The Golden Girls, I guarantee you it will be on some channel if you turn on the TV right now.