Golden Girls Forever

by Jim Colucci

  In Designing Women, which launched in 1986, vain Southern beauty queen Suzanne Sugarbaker would certainly sense sisterhood with Blanche. And apart from the difference in accents, Charlene Frazier’s hometown of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, could easily be mistaken for Rose’s birthplace of St. Olaf, Minnesota. Suzanne’s older sister, Julia, is clearly the Dorothy of the group—smart, opinionated, and prone to speak her mind. Only Annie Potts’s character of Mary Jo Shively is no easy match to a Golden Girl, perhaps because at the start, Mary Jo was the show’s least defined character. Over seven seasons, Mary Jo grew from a sheltered, naïve Rose-type into essentially a mini Julia, another Dorothy. So it’s no surprise that after his initial appearance in an early first-season episode (and also after actor Meshach Taylor’s small role in the Golden Girls pilot), Designing Women quickly promoted African-American delivery man Anthony Bouvier to regular status; like Sophia, he provides needed commentary from an outsider’s perspective (this time due to race and gender rather than age).

  “There were so many pop culture references in The Golden Girls—and when you look back, many of them don’t hold up. But that also gave the writers opportunity to constantly be dogging Designing Women, putting in jokes to bash that show. I remember one example, from the fourth season, in the episode ‘Stan Takes a Wife.’ As Sophia is in a hospital bed, recovering from pneumonia, she tells the Girls, ‘I survived war, disease—and two seasons of Designing Women!’”

  —RICK COPP, writer

  Starting in 1993 on Fox, Living Single was almost a direct copy of The Golden Girls—and in fact, as Golden Girls writer Kevin Abbott explains, the show’s creator, Yvette Lee Bowser, even asked him for a copy of the Golden Girls pilot script to use as a template. Living Single’s characters of Khadijah and Synclaire James and Regine Hunter fit perfectly into the molds established by Dorothy, Rose, and Blanche, respectively. Again, only the Sophia role seems hard to fill, perhaps because when creating a show about young black women, there’s no obvious parallel for an old lady. But Erika Alexander’s character, Maxine Shaw, comes pretty close; in her flirtatious banter with upstairs neighbor Kyle, she can be the most outrageous and outspoken of the four friends.

  In HBO’s hit Sex and the City, it’s obvious which of the characters is “the slut” and which one is a little bit naïve. And while both Miranda Hobbes and Carrie Bradshaw have moments of Dorothy-like cynicism, it’s Miranda who is the true master of the form. Although not a perfect fit in the Sophia role, obviously younger and sexier Carrie does share some of the old woman’s characteristics; in diner scenes (the show’s equivalent of cheesecake scenes) Carrie is often the character to sum up the situation, even at her friends’ expense. And just as Sophia recaps her roommates’ problems with pithy one-liners, Carrie literally narrates the travails of her friends, typing them on her laptop screen.

  Inevitably, in 2005 came the first gay take on the formula, Logo’s Noah’s Arc. “I didn’t set out to make a Golden Girls,” says the show’s creator, Patrik-Ian Polk. For one thing, instead of a multicamera sitcom about women, Noah’s Arc was a single-camera, serialized drama about men. “But I did want to do a show about four black gay men, and so there are obvious parallels” to the Girls with his characters: sweet, naïve Noah, sexually voracious Ricky, sarcastic Chance, and outrageous Alex. “There were times when we’d have a funnier scene coming up with the four guys together, and I would say to them, ‘Think of this as a real Golden Girls–type scene.’ And they’d immediately get it.”

  In 1990, during the Golden Girls’ run, one of the show’s writer/producers, Gail Parent, landed her co-creation Babes at Fox; but the sitcom about three overweight sisters and their elderly neighbor in a Manhattan apartment building was canceled after a single season. Ultimately it would be Gail’s fellow Golden Girls writer Marc Cherry who would find the greatest success by tapping into the power of the Rule of Four. Having tinkered with the formula in 1994 by creating The Five Mrs. Buchanans for CBS, Marc brought Desperate Housewives to ABC a decade later, while acknowledging his debt to the four ladies from Miami. “Blanche was my favorite character to write for,” he remembers. “Because the character was so selfish and vain and self-obsessed, and yet you still liked her.” Marc admits, “There were a lot of traces of Blanche Devereaux in Gabrielle Solis. It’s totally a credit to the actor. Like Rue McClanahan, Eva Longoria is one of those actors who is able to be likable when she is doing some unlikable things.”

  Otherwise, though, Marc says that although his training comes from The Golden Girls, the construction of Desperate Housewives was more akin to that of one of its older siblings under the Golden Rule of Four, Sex and the City. Thus, his Lynette Scavo equaled Miranda, Bree Van De Kamp was Charlotte, and lead character Susan Mayer was akin to lead character Carrie. In creating Susan, “I chose to make the romantic character the show’s anchor instead of the common-sense one, as was done on The Golden Girls,” Marc explains. “Susan Harris’s paradigm was so successful—and indeed, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason copied it on Designing Women—that I just chose to emulate something else.”

  In 2013, Marc gave the formula yet another twist in creating his follow-up series, Devious Maids. It’s easy to see parallels to Rose in naïve, good-hearted Rosie, and to Blanche in sexy and self-centered Carmen. And while the educated, intellectual Marisol has obvious similarities to Dorothy, Marc points out that “the tart-tongued part of Dorothy you will find in Zoila’s mouth.” In creating his Devious characters, he says, “I kind of took Dorothy and split her up.”

  As Marc explains, “due to her youth and inexperience” there’s no obvious singular Golden antecedent for Devious’ fifth maid, Valentina; she has the naïveté of Rose, she’s a daughter like Dorothy, and as one set apart by age, she could even be seen as a twenty-first-century Sophia. But Marc does acknowledge the Girls as an influence when he was conceiving the character. In speaking with real domestic workers in Beverly Hills, he reveals, “I discovered that it was not uncommon for there to be two members of one family working in a home. And because I remembered the mileage we always got from having Sophia and Dorothy in the same household, I knew how effective it would be to again have a mother/daughter connection in this new female ensemble show.”

  By 2012, viewers were ready for a foursome from a whole new generation, and HBO’s Girls was born. Although the show’s creator and star, Lena Dunham, didn’t base her Girls directly on the Girls from Miami, she does see at least one obvious parallel: “I think we can all agree that [Jessa] is Blanche.” As the show’s executive producer Bruce Eric Kaplan further explains, Lena’s creations do descend from Sophia, Dorothy, Rose, and Blanche—albeit indirectly. Addressing head-on the inevitable comparisons to its HBO ancestor Sex and the City, Girls’ pilot featured not only a discussion of Carrie and company, but also a poster of the iconic nineties series on Shoshanna’s bedroom wall. “We have a very clear connection to Sex and the City,” Bruce explains. “Girls is an update of Sex and the City, much as Sex and the City was so clearly a modernist version of The Golden Girls. So I guess Girls’ link to The Golden Girls is sort of transitive.” Thus, he adds, Girls lead character Hannah Horvath may be more direct a legacy of her more immediate predecessor Carrie Bradshaw than she is of Dorothy or Sophia. But he agrees the connection is there.

  Most recently, HBO debuted another fab foursome with Looking, a San Francisco–set comedy about the lives of three gay men and their straight female BFF. One of the show’s producers, John Hoffman, explains that he and his fellow writers were so conscious from the start of their LGBT target audience’s love of the Girls that as they initially brainstormed potential titles for the series, he suggested Golden Sons.

  The proposed title didn’t fly, but Looking’s 2014 debut season still ended up being book-ended by Golden Girls references. As the show was in mid-shoot of its second episode, its British-born writer/producer/director Andrew Haigh suggested a last-minute script change, replacing lead character Patrick’s reference to Friends�
�� Ross and Rachel with a recitation of the lyrics to the Golden Girls theme. As Andrew reveals, after each long day of shooting on location, he had gotten in the habit of unwinding in his San Francisco hotel room by watching The Golden Girls. And so was born what would become the series’ running joke, which paid off in the waning moments of the first season’s finale as Patrick climbed into Agustín’s bed with his laptop, recommitting to their roommate tradition of watching the Girls together.

  As the episode faded with “Thank You for Being a Friend” over its closing credits, it was an appropriate season ending for a series about a friendly foursome—particularly one that has obvious parallels in terms of its characters: naïve Patrick to Rose, caustic Agustín to Dorothy, and sexually charged Dom to Blanche. As the group’s only female, Doris stands out as its quippy Sophia—although “for the record,” notes Looking’s creator/writer, Michael Lannan, “our Sophia is actually our costume designer, Danny Glicker.”

  GOLDEN GIRLS:

  THE NEXT GENERATION

  “At tapings of Hot in Cleveland, during breaks between scenes, our warm-up comedian, Michael Burger, would often play different TV theme songs for the studio audience. When the Golden Girls theme would come on, everybody would go crazy. And even though I would usually be backstage, that song would pull me out in front of the crowd like a magnet.”

  —BETTY WHITE

  IN THE SPRING of 2010, TV Land, previously known as a home for reruns of TV classics, decided to get into the business of original programming. And for a cable network looking to make a splash in sitcoms, what better show to emulate than a certain generation-spanning megahit?

  The network’s first and so far most successful original comedy, Hot in Cleveland, was the story of three aging Angelenas who decide to move to Ohio after finding they were considered more attractive in the Rust Belt, and their new house’s cantankerous nonagenarian caretaker. That last role, not so accidentally, was played by Betty White. “When I was first thinking about Hot in Cleveland, I actually was thinking about [The Golden Girls and] what those women [would be like] today,” says the show’s creator, Suzanne Martin. “The two shows certainly did have a lot in common.”

  Just as had the Girls, Hot in Cleveland’s four leading ladies comprised a supergroup of TV comedy, with each actress already iconic from a previous TV role. And Cleveland’s twenty-first-century foursome hewed to the Golden formula so unabashedly that early on the show’s stars sat down to discuss exactly who compared to whom.

  “We’ve been trying to figure it out,” admitted Valerie Bertinelli, who played Cleveland’s trusting and optimistic self-help writer Melanie Moretti. “I do know that I’m probably Rose.” Jane Leeves, too, had a strong viewpoint about her character, the sardonic, unlucky-at-love eyebrow stylist turned private eye Joy Scroggs: “I’m definitely the Dorothy.”

  Meanwhile, the former Rose, Betty White, graduated into Cleveland’s Sophia-like part; her character, the cranky but wise Polish-born Elka Ostrovsky, was supplied not only with the wisdom that comes with age but with the show’s most devastating one-liners. But, as Betty’s costar Wendie Malick pointed out, Elka had a strain of Dorothy in her, too. Unlike with the oft-confused Sophia, with Elka, “Nothing gets past her.”

  The cast of the Celebration Theatre’s Golden Girls/Hot in Cleveland mashup (left to right): Michael A. Shepperd, Max Greenfield, Hot in Cleveland stars Wendie Malick, Jane Leeves, Betty White, and Valerie Bertinelli, and Millicent Martin.

  Photo by SEAN LAMBERT, courtesy of CELEBRATION THEATRE.

  Wendie admitted that her character, egocentric actress Victoria Chase, was probably Cleveland’s Blanche. “Although I think you might have to split Dorothy in half, giving some of her sarcasm to Joy and some to Victoria.

  “Besides,” Wendie added, “Victoria didn’t sleep around as much as Joy did,” which was, not so coincidentally, the same type of defense Rue McClanahan used to offer for Blanche.

  Hot in Cleveland was not shy about paying homage to its Golden ancestor, both on- and offscreen. In March 2014, in the show’s live fifth-season premiere, the star of Cleveland’s spin-off The Soul Man, Cedric the Entertainer, crossed over to Cleveland as his character Reverend Boyce. After Elka delivered a jab about Steve Harvey being the funniest of the Kings of Comedy, Boyce came back with a retort: “Oh, the way Rue McClanahan was the funny one on The Golden Girls?” Betty expertly waited out the laugh as the audience responded to the in-joke. “I never saw that show,” Elka responded dismissively. (Betty would soon get a shot at revenge; immediately after the live episode of Hot in Cleveland, the ninety-two-year-old legend raced over to Soul Man’s soundstage next door to guest star on that show’s live season premiere as well.)

  As the fifth season of the bona fide sitcom hit was airing on TV Land, one of its executive producers, Todd Milliner, was brainstorming ways to raise money to support LA’s Celebration Theatre, of which he is a board member and his partner is one of the artistic directors, along with Michael A. Shepperd. When Todd suggested a historic mashup of the Girls from Miami with the ladies of Cleveland, “Ding, we knew we had a winning idea,” Shepperd remembers.

  Left to right, Hot in Cleveland co-stars Wendie Malick, Valerie Bertinelli and Jane Leeves walk the red carpet for Betty’s 90th birthday celebration at Los Angeles’ Biltmore Hotel, January, 2012.

  After another of Celebration’s troupe members, former Golden Girls writer Stan Zimmerman, suggested a performance of the script for his season-one episode “Blanche and the Younger Man,” the Hot in Cleveland stars divvied up the four iconic roles. Valerie prepared to play Rose, Wendie to play Blanche, and Jane, despite her British accent, would be Sicilian Sophia. The casting happened to fit the women’s Cleveland characters—but the assignments were actually made based on Betty having first dibs. And this time, Betty wanted to play Dorothy.

  “This is so surreal,” Stan told the excited audience of the theater company’s benefactors, seated on the CBS Radford lot’s Stage 19 on the night of April 26, 2014. As he introduced the table read of the twenty-nine-year-old shooting script he had unearthed from his files—which included never-before-heard jokes that had been cut for time from the finished episode—Stan gestured at the chair about to be occupied by Betty White. “One of the Girls literally is here,” he noted. “But I watched a rehearsal earlier today. And the Hot in Cleveland cast is invoking such a Golden Girls vibe, I feel like the other three are also here tonight.”

  The performance would go on to be a highlight both for the Celebration Theatre, which raised more than enough money to pay off its debt—and particularly, as former Golden Girls script coordinator Robert Spina noted, for Betty White. “Betty was first cast to play Blanche, played Rose for eight years [including Golden Palace], on Hot in Cleveland is essentially playing Sophia, and now has the chance to play Dorothy,” he cited. “So as of tonight, Betty White has gotten to be all four of the Golden Girls.”

  In 2010, as Hot in Cleveland began shooting its first season, Betty White scribbled a Golden Girls-themed blessing on the wall of Stage 19 at Los Angeles’ CBS Radford Studios.

  Photos by AUTHOR.

  SHARING CHEESECAKE WITH

  BETTY WHITE

  “I love cheesecake, but I never eat on camera. I just toy with it. But ask Rue about what she does. Because I’m telling you, if it’s on camera, it’s a license to steal, as far as Rue is concerned. It has no calories. So she’d not only eat the cheesecake, but when Sophia would make spaghetti, she’d eat that, too.”

  —BETTY WHITE

  AS AN ACTOR, you get so many bad scripts, but when I read the pilot script for The Golden Girls, I sat up and took notice. It was different from anything I’d gotten. And it was all because of the wonderful writing. The four of us get a lot of credit, but we couldn’t do it if it weren’t for the amazing scripts. I promise you, as an actor you can screw up a good show, but you can’t save a bad one if it’s not on the page.

  From the first table read of the script, we kn
ew we were on to something. Everyone was so perfectly cast that the minute you heard the lines coming out of our mouths, it was exciting. I’ve never had a read-through like that. All of a sudden, I’d start throwing them over the net, and I’d get them right back. We all had the same reaction. We could feel the chemistry. We could taste it.

  The magic of the show was the way the writers drew our characters so distinctly. All these years I’ve used the analogy of four points on a compass. We balanced each other out beautifully. And not only were the lines wonderful, but they would shoot the reactions of the other characters. So pretty soon, since the audience got to know these women so well, they’d start to anticipate. “Oh, how is Bea going to react to that?” Or Rue, or Estelle. It made for a very exciting seven years.

  Right from the beginning, Rue would always remark how evidently Rose and Charlie had had a very active sex life. Off camera, that was always Rue’s thing: “Come on, Rose gets more action than Blanche does!” That was the beautiful part about the writing. We could get away with murder and talk about so many things. At our age, everybody knew we’d been around the block, and so the talk wasn’t as salacious as it would have been with younger women. And it was funnier because we were our ages, rather than if we had been young enough to be participants.

  I always believed that Rose was truly naïve more than dumb. I’d hear people calling her ditzy or a dumbbell, and I would defend her. Of course, she did think her second-grade teacher was Adolf Hitler, so it was a very fine line. In playing Rose, I found that the most interesting challenge was that even though as an actor I had to kind of think funny and play on things in my head I had to be careful to keep the awareness not only out of my mouth but also out of my eyes. Rose couldn’t ever look like she got it. She had to be innocence personified. That was the saving grace that would allow her to get away with saying something like “Can you believe that backstabbing slut?” about Blanche. Those were the lines where the producers would warn me: “You never get it. You’re never too smart for the room.” They knew coming from Rose the line would work, but coming from me it wouldn’t.