by Jim Colucci
The B plot was about Blanche dating the mama’s boy, played by Peter Graves, and I think the two stories really worked well together. They were both about mother issues—but sometimes, when your A plot and B plot are mining the same theme that can be the kiss of death. I was relieved here to see that somehow they gel.
EPISODE 161 and 162
THE MONKEY SHOW
(PARTS 1 & 2)
Written by: MARC SOTKIN & MITCHELL HURWITZ Directed by: LEX PASSARIS Original airdate: NOVEMBER 9, 1991
In order to help Stan (Herb Edelman) move on with his life, Dorothy accompanies the yutz to appointments with his psychiatrist, Dr. Halperin (Steve Landesberg). The doctor’s strange methods include encouraging Stan to transfer his feelings for his ex-wife to a fake monkey; but with Stan now more attached to his new stuffed friend, Fifi, Dorothy is thrilled to hear the doctor’s next recommendation: that she and her ex now spend at least two years without further contact.
At the same time, the Girls get a visit from Dorothy’s formerly haughty sister, Gloria (Dena Dietrich), who recently lost all her money in junk bonds. At Sophia’s behest, Dorothy not only agrees not to gloat at her widowed sister’s misfortune, but even fixes her up with some dates while she’s in town. Unfortunately, the strangers in Dorothy’s little black book turn out not to be to Gloria’s liking—but as everyone sees in the first episode’s cliffhanger, a familiar face like Stan is. “Good news,” Stan tells her as he and Gloria are caught with the covers pulled up to their chins. “I’m off the monkey.”
Meanwhile, for days nobody had believed Sophia that there was a hurricane a’comin’. But now the storm is here in full force, almost preventing Dr. Halperin and his date, the Girls’ neighbor Carol Weston (Dinah Manoff), from making an emergency house call to see Stan. The doctor diagnoses a “codependence transference,” and things at least inside the house calm down—until Gloria lets it slip that it was Sophia who pushed her into the liaison with Stan. Dorothy fights with her mother, and Sophia heads out to wander around in the wrath of Hurricane Gil.
Things are also not going very well down at the local TV station, where Rose has drafted Blanche into helping organize an eight-hour telethon to save the McKinley Lighthouse. But with trees and power lines downed by the storm, no one else can reach the station in time for the broadcast. So Blanche and Rose take to the airwaves to perform the longest two-woman show in TV history. But in the end, all their vamping is for naught; Rose receives a bulletin to read on the air, noting that the McKinley Lighthouse has been destroyed by the waves.
When policemen come to enforce a mandatory evacuation of Richmond Street, bringing residents to the TV station for shelter, Sophia is nowhere to be found—but Gloria can be found, in bed with Stan again. Sophia, meanwhile, has made it to the apartment of her big brother, Angelo (Bill Dana), who advises her to make things right with Dorothy as they, too, head for shelter. But by that time, at the TV station with Stan, Dorothy is already working out her own feelings, admitting to having been jealous when she saw the man with her sister. The two exes agree that they’re best together when they’re not together, and yet still in each other’s lives, as co-parents, co-grandparents, and begrudging friends.
COMMENTARY: This two-part episode comprised one hour’s worth of a hurricane theme night that blew through all three of NBC’s Saturday night sitcoms—the others being fellow Witt/Thomas productions Empty Nest and Nurses. Since all three shows were set in Miami, NBC’s Warren Littlefield had requested a November sweeps stunt where characters could cross over from show to show. So, that night, Nest’s Dinah Manoff checked in on the Girls, while Sophia visited Nest neighbors the Westons, and Rose showed up at Nurses’ Community Medical Center. The stunt worked; the high winds produced monster ratings (and inspired NBC to create another crossover Saturday, “Moon Over Miami,” for later that season, marking the leap-year full moon on February 29, 1992).
The two cops who report to the house should know the address well; they’re played by Jonathan Schmock, a comedic character actor who had small roles in three other Golden Girls episodes, and Matthew Saks, Bea Arthur’s real-life son. In another nepotistic bit of casting, the telethon impressionist, Davey Cricket, is played by one of the show’s writers, Don Seigel, who was known in the Golden Girls writers’ room for his uncanny insect noise. “He’d actually done it on The Gong Show, and so I said, ‘Let’s put it in the episode!’” Mitch Hurwitz remembers.
The offices of R. Halperin, MD.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
The TV station’s telethon set, complete with a standee of the now-destroyed McKinley Lighthouse.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
Ironically, the lighthouse telethon would be no sweat for Betty White, who started her career at Los Angeles TV station KLAC in 1949, soon hosting up to five and a half hours per day of the live variety show Hollywood on Television. And in another irony, Gloria is now housebound in Miami due to bad weather—and yet, actress Dena Dietrich is best known to many fans as Mother Nature from the popular series of TV ads for Chiffon margarine that ran from 1971 to 1979. Is it just a coincidence that right after Gloria gets confronted by her sister, there’s a hurricane a’comin?
PAUL WITT: This wasn’t NBC’s first stunt night, but it was the first one where there was this kind of continuity. A stunt night had previously been that “all three shows will deal with Halloween.” But here, the night had three of our company’s shows, The Golden Girls, Empty Nest, and Nurses, all set in the same city, so we could have a continuing storyline.
KEVIN ABBOTT: Mitch Hurwitz wrote one of my favorite lines in this episode, for the cheesecake scene. Dorothy is talking about rough times with her ex-husband: “Stan and I went through a period where we had no marital relations at all. I totally cut off his sex.” And Rose naively asks, “You mean, it grows back?”
I remember the laugh that followed. The director had a camera on each of the ladies, and he’d just switch from one to the other, capturing their separate reactions. They’d cut to Dorothy rolling her eyes, then Rose shrugging. Then Sophia, then Blanche. And with each new reaction, the audience would keep on laughing. It went on for about thirty seconds, an unbelievably rolling laugh that they had to trim way down when the show went to air. That’s why The Golden Girls was such a fun show to work on. There was really great writing, but then we also had in the cast these complete professionals who would take what you gave them and amplify it.
MITCHELL HURWITZ: There was a point where the show started to get a little more high-concept, and this episode is an example. I was really into behaviorism at the time, having studied some of that in college. Dorothy’s line about the experiments with baby monkeys was something I had studied. The idea was that monkeys will transfer their affections to something soft and warm—so we thought, “What if Stan had to do that, but he couldn’t get a person, so he had a soft monkey, too?” It may have started with real science, but after that we made it up. In fact I remember that it was Tracy Gamble’s joke that instead of getting rid of the monkey, Stan might end up with a smaller and smaller one, until he can keep it on his key chain.
“While Blanche is doing that, why don't I head on over to the piano? I'd like to sing you a song that I used to sing as a child. It's an old Minnesotan farm song entitled ‘I Never Thought I'd Grow a Hair There.’”
—ROSE
DENA DIETRICH: I had worked with Danny Thomas on a show, The Practice, in the 1970s. So in the first season when The Golden Girls was casting for Dorothy’s sister, Tony Thomas brought me in to audition—but I didn’t get it. Then, years went by, and they wanted to bring the character Gloria back again. I guess they looked at me then and said well she is tall and looks like Bea. I had even done the same part of Lucy Brown, which Bea had played in Threepenny Opera.
Practically every week, someone comes up to me and quotes a line from the episode. Inevitably, it�
��s a particular one of Estelle’s lines, which seems to be the one people love the most. “There’s a hurricane a’comin’!” Everyone expects me to know all the lines from the episode. Of course, now that I’ve heard that one five thousand times, I do. It blows me away when I hear from a fan about The Golden Girls or Mother Nature. Even though the ads went off the air long ago, Nick at Nite showed them for years, so people would write to me about those, too. That may trail off because I think they’ve stopped airing. But God knows The Golden Girls will go on forever.
The police (Jonathan Schmock [left] and Matthew Saks) show up to evacuate Richmond Street—and get a glimpse of Blanche’s legendary bedroom.
Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC via GETTY IMAGES.
EPISODE 163
DATELINE: MIAMI
Written by: JAMIE WOOTEN & MARC CHERRY Directed by: PETER D. BEYT Original airdate: NOVEMBER 2, 1991
As Dorothy leaves for a Saturday night date at L’Auberge—a restaurant Rose claims jerks love—the other Girls reminisce about their own terrible dates of days past. Rose recalls her own not-so-romantic dinner at L’Auberge with John, a.k.a. Alan, a.k.a. Peter (Pat Harrington Jr., 1929-2016), who has apparently worked his way through all the women in Miami—and judging by the reaction of their waiter (Nick Ullett), some of the men. But what’s even worse than finding out your blind date is a liar and philanderer? When the evening ends with his arrest, and the revelation that he’s also known as Schlomo Ziegler, the Freeway Flasher.
Blanche recounts her own rotten rendezvous with the man who may present the biggest challenge to her skills in seduction: teetotaling, virginal Bob (Fred Willard), who is four months out of the priesthood. But actually, this New Year’s Eve seems truly worse for Rose, who is forced to fend off Bob’s lecherous brother Arnie (Lenny Wolpe). In crying over his supposedly dead wife, Elsie—who turns out to be merely away at a fat farm in Sarasota—Arnie tries to get his kisses, and more, well before midnight. Rose kicks him to the curb, but, remaining in the living room, ruins Blanche’s chances with the ex-priest with her guilt-inducing protestations about how sex should always be with someone you love. Now alone at the stroke of midnight, resourceful Blanche, in need of a kiss to start her year right, looks to her roommate. But she strikes out there, too, as Rose reflexively warns her, “Don’t even think about it.”
Saved for last, Sophia’s date story turns out not to be about a jerk from her own past, but about the jerk from Dorothy’s, one Stanley Zbornak. Picture it: Brooklyn, 1948. Sophia attempts to bribe her friend’s son Myron (Jesse Dabson) to date her daughter, but it’s too late; young Dorothy (Lyn Greene) announces that she’s expecting, courtesy of young Stan (Richard Tanner), who even in flashback Sophia has already christened the Yutz.
COMMENTARY: In The Golden Girls’ second season, it had been Rose who showed instinctual kindness on learning that Dorothy’s friend Jean was a lesbian, falling in love with her. Two years later, it was Rose who became the confidante for Blanche’s gay brother, Clayton, offering a supportive shoulder. And yet here, Rose seems surprisingly ill at ease with two separate same-sex situations, both nervously rebuffing Blanche’s move at midnight, and even appearing to opt out of a commiserating hug from a gay waiter. If these truly are slights on Rose’s part, they hardly seem like intentional statements as to her character, but more like the show’s writers needing comic “buttons” to cap off the two vignettes.
What this episode lacks in Zbornak-icity, it makes up for in suitors for the remaining three Girls, with quite a few prominent male stars in guest roles. Pat Harrington had been a prolific comic actor and voice performer, and had logged a long list of appearances on late-night shows Tonight Starring Jack Paar and The Steve Allen Show, as well as roles on sitcoms such as Make Room for Daddy, before landing the role in 1975 for which he would become best known, as meddling superintendent Dwayne Schneider on Norman Lear’s CBS sitcom One Day at a Time.
Appearing here in the same vignette with Harrington is Nick Ullett, who came to the United States from his native England in 1964 and worked mostly in New York theater. After appearing in the hit 1986 film Down and Out in Beverly Hills, he played several sitcom guest roles, including in Witt/Thomas’s Blossom. Shortly after his work on The Golden Girls, from 1992 to 1994, Nick appeared on the CBS soap As the World Turns.
Playing the innocent ex-priest is Fred Willard, whose clean-cut exterior and midwestern accent belie a wicked wit in every character he plays. From Sirota’s Court and Fernwood 2 Night in the late 1970s through later roles on Roseanne and Everybody Loves Raymond, he has spent decades as a beloved comic actor on TV and in such films as Anchorman, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, and Best in Show.
And finally, playing brother Arnie to Fred’s Bob is Lenny Wolpe, a New York stage actor who had made only a few TV appearances before being cast on The Golden Girls. In the years since, he has continuously appeared in gueststar spots on the small screen. More recently, he’s appeared on Broadway in such recent shows as Wicked, The Drowsy Chaperone, and Bullets Over Broadway.
MARC CHERRY: The main reason for this being a wraparound episode was that Bea Arthur had a medical problem for which she was off the show for a month, getting an operation. So they pretaped her few scenes for the beginning and end of the show. And because Estelle had to be made up separately for the current and flashback scenes, we pretaped Estelle, too. Betty was sick that night—you can kind of hear a little soreness in her voice—so we were a little concerned. But when an episode is built on a series of vignettes like this, it’s easier to write.
When Jamie [Wooten] and I had first gone in to pitch stories to The Golden Girls, we had pitched an idea about Blanche dating a priest—and the writers kind of made fun of us because they didn’t like how we told it. That ended up becoming the Blanche vignette here, with Fred Willard. We felt that it was one of those stories that couldn’t sustain a whole episode, but it could make for one perfectly funny scene as Lenny Wolpe’s character tries to make it with Rose, and Blanche finds out her guy is an ex-priest, and a virgin.
Marc Sotkin had done a version of this episode on his previous series It’s a Living, where it’s just an excuse to show bad dates, and he called it “The Jerk Show.” But ultimately, we showed more than just bad dates, and Jamie and I were really happy and proud that we got to construct an important moment in the Girls’ long-established history: showing how Sophia learned that Dorothy was pregnant.
Blanche attempts to seduce virginal ex-priest Bob (Fred Willard).
Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES /A BC via GETTY IMAGES.
PETER D. BEYT: I didn’t have a problem with the fact that Rose’s date has slept with both women and men, because I’d been with both men and women before myself. The part I didn’t really like was where, after it was revealed what a dog the guy was, the waiter still said, “Call me.” Why if you have any self-respect would you want him to call? Then, as the guy is being taken away by the cops, the waiter asks Rose for a hug—and she has a little bit of a grossed-out reaction. That again wasn’t my favorite thing. I remember Nina [Feinberg Wass] and I wanted to edit the scene to end it earlier, because you really didn’t need that final beat anyway. It would have be fine to end on seeing Rose’s surprised expression as the guy is carried off.
LENNY WOLPE: There were a lot of guest stars in this episode, because there were so many vignettes being shot. I was really awed by how good Lynnie Greene was, playing the young Dorothy in a flashback scene. It was uncanny how she captured the essence of a young Bea Arthur; they could have made that a spinoff. With all those different storylines going on, it was kind of a complicated shoot—and yet, it was also kind of an easy week, because everybody was in a great mood.
My first job when I’d gotten to California had been a few episodes on Empty Nest, also for Witt/Thomas/Harris, which shot on the soundstage next door. Witt/Thomas was a very small company, so we’d see all of the Golden Girls people wandering around. And so I
had a very fond feeling coming back to the lot to do this episode. By then, I’d also done a few episodes of L.A. Law, playing a character with Tourette’s Syndrome. At that time, the illness wasn’t very much in the public eye, and those episodes had brought it more to the forefront, and taken away some of the shame and the mystery. Well, it turned out, when I met Estelle Getty on The Golden Girls, she told me she had a family member with Tourette’s. We spent so much time together, talking about it, with her telling me she was grateful for my character. We made a real connection, and she was wonderful, sharing stories with me.
I was cast in this episode as a cad, which was really against type for me. That’s probably why I was hired, because they probably wanted someone where initially you wouldn’t expect that kind of behavior. For me, it was a real treat—and I got to kiss Betty White, which was the high point of my career. She is probably the nicest person I’ve ever worked with, making you feel so welcome. And she was also a really good sport. She was nursing a horrible cold all week, to the point where she could barely talk. But she was so gracious about it. And as we rehearsed, every time we got to the kiss, she would say, “Lenny, you can, but I just don’t want you to get sick!” I started to think, “Jeez, I wonder what’s going to happen on Friday, on tape night!” Well I don’t know where Betty went before Friday, but by that night she sounded great, much healthier. We smooched—and I did not catch her cold.
NICK ULLETT: I remember this episode particularly well, because it ended up being very important to me. At that point in 1991, I was battling non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which had caused me to leave the Broadway show Me and My Girl. I had undergone chemotherapy for more than a year, and then had a six-month remission. But just as this episode was happening, the cancer came galloping back.