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

Melissa Roth: Weirding Way Media  

Amy Englehardt [Singing]: 80s TV Ladies, So sexy and so pretty. 80s TV Ladies, Steppin’ out into the city. 80s TV Ladies, often treated kind of sh-[wolf whistle]. Working hard for the money in a man’s world. 80s TV Ladies!

Melissa Roth: Hello, 80s TV Ladies listeners. Welcome to the podcast that looks back in order to leap forward. Here are your hosts, Susan Lambert Hatem and Sharon Johnson.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Hello, I'm Susan.

Sharon Johnson: And I'm Sharon. Now, we are a joy filled podcast and almost always look on the bright side of things.

Susan Lambert Hatem: 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.

Sharon Johnson: We're currently exploring The Golden Girls and we have so many great things to say about it, but we also wanna acknowledge that nothing's perfect. And that includes The Golden Girls.

Susan Lambert Hatem: 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.

Sharon Johnson: Absolutely.

Susan Lambert Hatem: We have to take the good and the bad, the facts of life,  

Melissa Roth: And there you have—

Susan Lambert Hatem: The facts of life. So I'm thinking we should call this the 10 things I hate about The Golden Girls.

Sharon Johnson: Mmm, I don't know. Do you-- Do we like that title?

Susan Lambert Hatem: Well, I did until you said you didn't like it that much.

Sharon Johnson: Well, I'm thinking, what about 10 not so great things about The Golden Girls? I just feel like hate is a little bit too strong.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Okay, okay, so 10 things maybe we don't love about The Golden Girls. Again, we're gonna do five each. We're gonna pass it off and back and forth, adding up to 10.

Sharon Johnson: And while The Golden Girls was groundbreaking and talked thoughtfully about hot button topics from AIDS to race to menopause to women and queer rights--  

Susan Lambert Hatem: It also got a few things wrong. We love the ladies, you know that. Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia, truly the golden 80s 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.

Sharon Johnson: And just to provide proper acknowledgement, we want to indicate that this topic was inspired by a Vulture article on The Golden Girls by Stephen W. Thrasher.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: 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 10 things we don't love about the Golden Girls.

Sharon Johnson: I'm kind of liking that.

Susan Lambert Hatem: You're liking that?

Sharon Johnson: Yeah.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Okay.

Sharon Johnson: So first, 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.

Susan Lambert Hatem: That made me sad. There were a 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, Bea 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 thought it sometimes could be cruel or overdone. I remember being like, whoa. They were snarking in a way that sometimes is too much for me. But it was like that was television sitcoms in the 80s. Mama's Family, Married With Children, All in the Family. Like 70s and 80s families could also be mean.

Sharon Johnson: 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 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, when it comes to this. So.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And speaking of that, the second fact is that for all its feminism and it's pretty amazing, there are four women of a certain age, and it's all focused on them and their conversation. some episodes could be surprisingly sexist and have weird moments and lines. The biggest, I think, is basically them ignoring what sounds like actual rape in the episode. They make jokes about it, especially date rape. Dorothy's tale of how she and her husband end up together basically implies that he slipped her something and had sex with her without protection. And she gets knocked up when they were young.

Sharon Johnson: While she was unconscious.

Susan Lambert Hatem: While she was unconscious. She says she's not conscious. It's weird. And then another time, Sophia talks about how, 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.

Sharon Johnson: But that said, that was a lot of the mindset at that time. So in that time-- I'm not excusing it, believe me. But at that time, that was what a lot of more people thought than certainly now. More people, most people, I'd like to think, understand that 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.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Yeah.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And the way she tells it, she clearly doesn't see herself as a victim.

Sharon Johnson: Right.

Susan Lambert Hatem: From. We're all like, oh, my God, let's get Dorothy into some therapy quick.

Sharon Johnson: Also, though, this show could be progressive for the time, as I'm sure the 90s TV Babies will point out, it was also very white, very, quote, other people are scary, close quote, very cis. It has deep roots about gold digging older women.

Susan Lambert Hatem: So. Yeah. So Brandon Tartikoff-- 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 ahold of it and it became about something else. But those were the two inspirations that are talked about often for Brandon Tartikoff to want this show. And I think sometimes that is there, right?

Sharon Johnson: Yeah. And just to clarify, Brandon Tartikoff was the president of ABC Entertainment at that time. So he would have been the one that said, yes, we're gonna make the show, or no, we're not gonna make the show.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Right. And he was throwing out. I mean, it felt like he was really like, hey, I want a show that's like this.

Sharon Johnson: Right.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And so he was really not always Presidents were doing that, but he was.

Sharon Johnson: Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Lambert Hatem: 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 other cultures. There's some appropriation of indigenous Americans. There's some cringy moments with their queer and disability episodes. Again, it's trying something. It's not always successful. It's trying to have these conversations. It's not always successful. But some of those episodes 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.

Sharon Johnson: 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, the streaming channels, but I'm sure you could find it if you really wanted to.

Susan Lambert Hatem: But it's surprising when you see it in a show that you expect is going to be so mindful.

Sharon Johnson: 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 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. But you know--

Susan Lambert Hatem: Having the conversation is awkward, right?

Sharon Johnson: Absolutely.

Susan Lambert Hatem: And so you're going to get it wrong. Right? So that's one of the lessons of the last 40, 50, 100 years, whatever.

Sharon Johnson: Exactly.

Susan Lambert Hatem: 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 to be open to a continued conversation.  

Sharon Johnson: Right.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: 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.

Sharon Johnson: 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 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 gonna shoot this. And that applies to all the episodes, whether they have some context that has to do with some of the more social issues or not every episode of any show is not gonna be the best that it can be. Some of them are just not gonna work.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Well, and I think I also wanna 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 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 get all the conversations right.

Sharon Johnson: Right. So next on the list is, that Blanche's Southern belle had a lot of dog whistles. For instance, she's from a plantation.

Susan Lambert Hatem: 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 80s. but watching it now I'm like, oh my God. Like. ‘Cause nobody lived on a plantation in the south in the 80s. It's insane. So there is, there's a lot of dog whistles in Blanche. And you're like, hm.

Sharon Johnson: But there are also--

Melissa Roth: What does that mean, dog whistle? I have no idea what that means.

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Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh, that's interesting. It's basically a phrase that means you're saying something and if you listen closely, it's telling people who are racist, it's giving them some cover.

Melissa Roth: It's like coding.

Susan Lambert Hatem: It's coding.

Sharon Johnson: Well, I take it a little bit differently. 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 think about it that way. That has some bigotry there behind it that again that they may or may not.

Melissa Roth: The dog whistle is silent unless you know to listen for it.

Susan Lambert Hatem: So it's a political message intended for and often only under understood by particular group. For instance, there seems to be a lot of that in certain, there's Nazi coding of certain things everywhere.  

Melissa Roth: Everywhere.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: So it's. Yeah, it's sort of. It can't be seen by everybody because you could go, oh, but they just mean this, right? It's the-- It's how the language shifted from actual racist language, outwardly racist language, to things like urban. It's how all Southern politics became in 1964.

Sharon Johnson: The use of the term urban is a perfect example because some people hear it as simply just meaning 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 minorities live, and as a result, it's crime ridden.

Melissa Roth: Crime ridden.

Sharon Johnson: You know, it has all these negative connotations. and that's the dog whistle of it.

Melissa Roth: Got it.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Law and order being the, you know, we're for law and order being the, you know, sort of the welfare queens of, you know, all that language that was happening in the 80s and now is--

Sharon Johnson: Oh, yeah, it's still there.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Is there. And again, I was lucky enough to grow up sort of in the umbrella of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act. And in that time when people, or at least proclaiming the desire to be equal and to be non-racist, maybe with not all the language that we have now, but where I was like, oh, this is what we're doing now. Right? I completely would miss some of that until it's pointed out to me, you know, Southern politics are very famous for it.

Sharon Johnson: Anyhoo.

Melissa Roth: Okay, now I know.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Now we know. But that every once in a while, Blanche cringes me. Thank you. All right, where are we? Oh, me.

Sharon Johnson: Oh, number six.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Okay. While they fought ageism with this show, they also used it. They leave Sophia. I said this before in the mean part. They leave Sofia 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. So it's the same thing where they're trying to have discussions about things, and sometimes it comes off a little cringey.

Sharon Johnson: Yeah. 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 belle, for instance. Rose is the ditzy blonde, and Sophia is the stereotypical feisty joke-telling old lady, one dimensional. The characters are often 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.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Ah. Sitcoms of the day.

Sharon Johnson: 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.

Susan Lambert Hatem: We love TV.

Sharon Johnson: That's right. And probably most of you listening, watched every episode, but not everybody does. So if you have something change with a character and the person hasn't, somebody hasn't watched for a few episodes, they don't understand how they got from point A to point B all the time. So they have a tendency to not have the lesson learned carry over too far forward because of that.

Susan Lambert Hatem: There's always a reset.

Sharon Johnson: Yeah.

Susan Lambert Hatem: For early sitcoms, for 70s, 80s, even 90s 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 necessarily come up again.

Sharon Johnson: 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 get a 10 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 and they didn't do that then, they don't do it now with most episodic television.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Absolutely. Yeah, and just like, ah, episodic television of the time and sitcoms even now, the laugh track in particular for this show is pretty prominent. Again, we watch 80s TV shows and there are laugh tracks for some reason. This one every once in a while throws me off a little bit more than some others. But it's a sitcom. But it's one of those things where you're like, wow, that sometimes it's not really matching what's happening.

Sharon Johnson: Next. Consistent inconsistency. They play really loose with their facts, which a lot of 80s TV shows did. But for deep divers, many of the names, dates and facts change. But that was a lot of shows from the 1980s other than, you know, reruns were. Yes, it was. But not everything got rerun. Not everything— Again--

Susan Lambert Hatem: Again, reruns did not happen in order.

Sharon Johnson: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Susan Lambert Hatem: All right, well, and the final 10 thing that I hate or we don't love about the show is 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 able to at least see Coco a couple of times a season and remain a friend. Because that would have been fun.

Sharon Johnson: Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Lambert Hatem: So that's one thing I'm like, they just dropped him like a hot potato and I didn't like that.

Sharon Johnson: 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 about--

Susan Lambert Hatem: You want a bonus not so fun fact.

Sharon Johnson: 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's something I'm not really happy about either.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Me either. That's our love-hate--

Sharon Johnson: Yes, exactly.

Susan Lambert Hatem: With the show. I feel like it should have had a reboot. I almost am afraid of a reboot now.

Sharon Johnson: I'm terrified. I am terrified of a reboot.

Susan Lambert Hatem: So the time that it should have had a reboot in some ways has passed for me because I am afraid. But that is a show that I think we would enjoy getting more of.

Sharon Johnson: Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the things that makes the possibility of a reboot successful is, 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. And sadly, most of the folks involved have all passed away—

Susan Lambert Hatem: Or retired.  

Sharon Johnson: Yeah. So maybe it's just as well. And to me, at this point, I leave The Golden Girls alone. They're fine as they are.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Make The Golden Girls wine, sell the pillows and the cheesecake candles.

Sharon Johnson: There you go.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Disney printing their Golden Girls money. It is funny that Disney ended up with the Golden Girls. I mean, I guess they had it, but--

Sharon Johnson: Yeah, yeah, they had it from the beginning. So--

Susan Lambert Hatem: All right, well, those were the 10 things we don't love about the Golden Girls. What are yours? If you have any, let us know.

Sharon Johnson: Yeah, we'd love to. As always, we'd love to hear from our, from, from our listeners.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Go to 80sTVLadies.com or email us at 8-0-S-T-V-L-A-D-I-E-S-dot-com.

Sharon Johnson: That's it.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Oh. Oh no, I'm sorry. I did it wrong.

Sharon Johnson: No, you did.

Susan Lambert Hatem: L-A-D-I-E-S at gmail dot com.

Sharon Johnson: Well, you gave the website first.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I gave the website first. That one I did right.

Sharon Johnson: That's right. Okay, so as we close, in today's audio-ography, you can read the Vulture article that started us down this path. It was from 2020. and it was called The Real Mud on Golden Girls, written by Stephen W. Thrasher.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Okay, 80s TV Ladies, let's talk about night sweats. It's not glamorous, but it's real and it’s happening to me. My absolute lifesaver -- Cozy Earth bamboo sheets. They're cooling and moisture wicking so I can finally sleep soundly without overheating and wetting up everything. They are worth the hype. Visit cozyearth.com and use our exclusive 80s TV Ladies 41% off code. 41%. And that code is 80sTVLadies.

Melissa Roth: Old Glory offers over 300,000 items for music, sports, entertainment and pop culture fans. It features officially licensed merch from iconic brands and top sports teams. Discover your perfect fan gear and save with our special code. 80sTVLadies gets you 15% off your entire purchase. Click the link in our description or go to oldglory.com and use the promo code 80sTVLadies.

Sharon Johnson: Dear 80s TV Ladies, we hope you have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hanukkah or a, Happy Kwanzaa or whatever your family and friends celebrate during this holiday season. We hope it's merry and bright for you all.

Susan Lambert Hatem: I love it. Winter solstice. I hope there is something beautiful outside. Definitely beauty inside and something warm to eat at the table.

Sharon Johnson: And here's to a much happier, healthier new Year for us all. So with that, as always, we hope 80s TV Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old shows to watch. All of which will lead us forward toward being amazing ladies of the 21st century.  

Susan Lambert Hatem: Woo-hoo!  

Sharon Johnson: Thanks, everyone.

Susan Lambert Hatem: Thank you.

Amy Englehardt [Singing]: 80s TV Ladies, So sexy and so pretty. 80s TV Ladies, Steppin’ out into the city. 80s TV Ladies, often treated kind of sh-[wolf whistle]. Working hard for the money in a man’s world. 80s TV Ladies!

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