CONCLUSION:
THE GIRLS ARE STILL GOLDEN TODAY
“During the production of only the third or fourth episode, I was watching a run-through with Paul Witt. I remember turning and saying to him that what these amazing women are doing is going to be like Lucy. He looked at me as if to say, ‘We’ll see.’ And I could have been wrong. But I’ve sat through a lot of run-throughs, and I’ve never had the same feeling that the material was clearly so universal and timeless we’ll still be laughing at it thirty, forty, fifty years later.”
– TONY THOMAS
PICTURE IT: NEW York City. On a midweek afternoon, hundreds of fans crowd inside a Barnes and Noble bookstore, and hundreds more huddle outside in the rain—all hoping for a moment with three of their idols. Finally, more than six hours after the line was officially established, there they were. At first glimpse, the crowd called out passionately for them, as if they were about to take the stage and burn up their electric guitars. But no, these three women were slightly older than your typical rock stars (even Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney).
Those three women are none other than the Golden Girls themselves, Bea Arthur, Betty White, and Rue McClanahan. And you’re probably also not surprised that these women have the power to elicit such a strong reaction from their fans. That November 22, 2005, as a crowd heavy on young girls and gay men filled the Barnes and Noble in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, the store quickly sold out of the show’s third-season DVD sets. A few of those at the front of the line had earned their spots by camping out overnight on the sidewalk, or in one case driving all night from Boston with her mother and sister. Two NYU students named Nya and Erin passed the time by leading fellow fans in a sing-along of “Thank You for Being a Friend.” Then, more than an hour before the Girls’ allotted signing time was to begin, bookstore employees had to cut off the queue at five hundred people. And so more fans took to the rainy street, piling five- and six-deep in front of the store’s north- and east-facing windows. There, as the three-hours-long signing commenced, one young male fan scored the moment he was hoping for: Betty saw his homemade sign: I’M SERIOUS—WILL YOU SHARE CHEESECAKE WITH ME?! She made a pantomime gesture for being way too full, and the two of them shared a laugh, six feet and several inches of glass apart.
By the summer of 2006—fourteen years after The Golden Girls ended its original run—the show was still drawing eleven million viewers per week and thirty million per month on the Lifetime cable network, its home from 1997 to 2009. Although up against much newer sitcom competition, any given one of the show’s seven daily airings still ranked among the top three “off-network” sitcoms shown by Lifetime, and among the top seven on any cable channel.
“There aren’t too many shows from 1985 which hold up like that,” notes television historian Tim Brooks, formerly Lifetime’s Vice President of Research and the coauthor with Earle Marsh of a TV fan’s bible, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows: 1946–Present. Tim explains that the steady viewership of The Golden Girls, barely changed from 1997 to that point in 2006, was very unusual. After all, over the course of those nine years, most of us viewers had aged into the next Nielsen age group—and some viewers, unfortunately, just plain die off. Yet, for example, the dinnertime airings of The Golden Girls, at 6:00 and 6:30 p.m., attracted 1.1 million viewers back in 1999, and still drew 1.1 million by 2005. So obviously, the show must have been continually attracting new fans to replace those who for one reason or another left. “That’s unusual because with all the competition out there, shows of any kind usually tend to wear out,” Tim says. “But The Golden Girls has turned out to be a long-distance runner.”
The show also turned out to be a boon for Lifetime in that it attracted a wider audience than the network’s typical fare. As Tim explains, whereas the typical Lifetime Original Movie tends to attract women in mostly the middle age ranges, the Girls’ appeal is not age specific. Younger women, older women—The Golden Girls is one of the few shows they all share. And since the network in general pulls strong ratings among African American women, so did the Girls. As Tim explains, “The show has a lot of gender appeal rather than being based on race or age.”
And although as of 2016, the Nielsen Corporation still does not report their viewership as its own demographic, everyone knows anecdotally that the Girls mean an awful lot to the Gays. As marketers continue to get hip to gays’ fabled disposable income, a few smaller research companies are beginning to track trends in LGBT viewership. And in the preliminary data Lifetime produced during the show’s tenure on that network, Tim says, The Golden Girls always did very well among gays; it was a top-ten cable show.
Only a few sitcoms have been turned into Saturday morning cartoons, such kid-focused fare as The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Gilligan’s Island, and Happy Days. The Animated Everyday Adventures of Sophia Petrillo and the Golden Gang would have been the first to feature an animated old lady, a testament to Sophia’s appeal to fans of all ages.
Illustration by KENT ZBORNAK, Courtesy of ROBERT SPINA.
Saturday Morning Girls
IN THE FALL of 1988, at the height of the Girls’ powers, the show’s production associate Robert Spina began to wonder, “What does Sophia do during the day while the other Girls are at work?” He answered his own question by conceiving an animated Saturday morning series, to be called The Animated Everyday Adventures of Sophia Petrillo and the Golden Gang and to star the voice of Estelle Getty.
“I imagined that the kids of Richmond Street would stop by to hang out with the badass grandma,” Robert explains. Accompanied by Empty Nest neighbor Harry Weston’s dog, Dreyfuss, and armed with Sophia’s all-powerful, multipurpose purse, the “Gang” would “have adventures around the neighborhood.” For adult viewers, each episode would feature Golden Girls “Easter eggs,” such as regular “Picture it: Sicily” stories, references to old friends from Shady Pines, and even cameo voice appearances by the other three Girls.
Robert and stage manager Kent Zbornak presented their pitch to Golden Girls producers Paul Witt and Tony Thomas, who jumped on board and brought the concept to executives at Disney. As Robert recalls, the typical series of meetings, notes, and rewrites ensued—but the project never came to fruition. Still, of having gotten to step briefly inside Sophia’s world, he says, “The whole experience was a blast.”
Golden Shout-Outs
FOR ALL THE times The Golden Girls presented its educated, liberal viewpoint on social issues, the show rarely got overtly political, favoring one party over another. In fact, writer Tom Whedon remembers that on the extremely rare occasion when he did slip some political commentary into a script “we got a very angry response.” In Tom’s season-five episode “Have Yourself a Very Little Christmas” in December 1989, a priest working at a soup kitchen refers sarcastically to Ronald Reagan’s handling of the homeless situation. “When the Great Communicator talked about his vision of a ‘City on a Hill,’ I wonder if it included people sleeping on gratings in the street,” remarks Reverend Avery (Matt McCoy). “The line slipped by the producers, or they probably wouldn’t have put it in,” Tom admits. “And it got more angry letters than anything that was ever on the show.”
So perhaps this episode’s anti-Reagan dig was still fresh on Republican senator Mitch McConnell’s mind in March 2013 when he invoked The Golden Girls at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. The then Senate minority leader from Kentucky was trying to pay a compliment to the youthful Republican rogues’ gallery of Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio as he quipped, “Don’t tell me the Democrats are the party of the future, when their presidential ticket for 2016 is shaping up to look like a rerun of The Golden Girls.” Undoubtedly McConnell meant the remark—a sexist slam aimed at Hillary Clinton, to be sure—to be disparaging. But by linking the Democrats in the minds of voters with four of America’s most beloved ladies, McConnell inadvertently illustrated just another way his right-wingers are out of touch.
Despite what McConnell seems to think, America continues to cherish its Girls, decades after the show went off the air. Alexander Payne’s 2013 film Nebraska, nominated for the year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, contained a nod to The Golden Girls, as Bruce Dern’s character’s extended midwestern family sat silent in their living room, mesmerized by the Miami matrons on their screen. And just a month before McConnell’s comment, in February 2013, an episode of NBC’s short-lived, decidedly young-and-hetero sitcom Guys with Kids (“Gary’s Idea”) had built a B plot around straight, young divorced dad Chris’s (Jesse Bradford) love of all things Golden. After deciding in a moment of midlife crisis to become a DJ, Chris’s new career was floundering—until he played his own custom remix of “Thank You for Being a Friend” for his college-age clientele.
In fact, on the small screen, the ladies of the eighties continue to earn shout-outs on the hippest, twenty-first-century shows. In 2004, after overhearing his star Rachel Bilson talking about how she loves to watch The Golden Girls with her friends, writer Josh Schwartz decided to write her passion into his teen soap, The O.C. And so in the first-season episode “The Third Wheel,” Rachel’s character, Summer, bonded with her romantic rival, Anna (Samaire Armstrong), singing “Thank You for Being a Friend” in front of the ladies’ room mirror at a rock concert. Two seasons later, in “The Party Favor,” Anna returned to Newport Beach to reassure Summer—“You’re still my Blanche, you know”—extending the Golden Girls reference into an extended, multiyear metaphor for female friendship.
In the last weeks of 2013, the elderly Girls were paid major homage on another youthful soap, with a plot thread on Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City prequel series, The Carrie Diaries. In 2007, Bea Arthur had appeared in a TV Land spoof, playing a geriatric Carrie Bradshaw obsessed with landing Abe Vigoda’s Mr. Big. (See it on YouTube by searching “Sex and the City—Parody starring Bea Arthur.”) But with a second-season story line on the CW network’s Carrie Diaries, the two worlds officially collided, resulting in what can only be described as a fan’s fever dream.
In the episode “The Second Time Around,” teenage Carrie’s high school friend Walt (Brendan Dooling), having been kicked out of his parents’ house after coming out, showed up at the Bradshaws’ door toting his prized box of VHS tapes full of Golden Girls episodes. And although Carrie’s lawyer father, Tom (Matt Letscher), was initially uncomfortable with the new living arrangement, he ultimately accepted Walt into his Connecticut home as the two bonded over their appreciation for the ladies of Miami.
With her show’s 1980s setting, The Carrie Diaries creator, Amy B. Harris, admits, “I always wanted to put The Golden Girls into the show somehow.” Amy, who previously had written for Sex and the City, had always heard that show called “a younger, more modern-day version of The Golden Girls,” and so mixing the Girls officially into the Carrie-verse “would be a really fun, meta experience.”
Aware of the gay community’s affection, the Carrie writers immediately focused on Walt as the character who would be the Girls’ biggest fan. “I loved the idea of a kid who was struggling to find himself being able to find a sense of community with these older women. And not only did the show give Walt comfort, but then it also provided a surprising common ground with Tom, where he could open up to him about the difficulties in his life,” Amy explains.
“I once asked my friend about how hard it was to come out. And because this was back in the eighties, when gay men didn’t necessarily think they could have marriages and kids of their own, he said the hardest thing was realizing he had to give up the ‘white picket fence’ dreams for his life. I think that’s what The Golden Girls was all about, too,” Amy theorizes. “Like the Girls, who lost their husbands, you envision a certain life for yourself for so long, and then you don’t get it. But in a way, you probably are happier—because you get something even better. That’s a powerful theme that resonates for so many people, and that’s what we wanted to tap into for our story line.”
Girls in the Afternoon
SHORTLY AFTER THE Carrie cast gave the Girls some prime time love, a very similar story line began to play out on daytime TV. In the summer of 2014, ABC’s soap General Hospital invoked The Golden Girls as a device to spark romance and jealousy in the love triangle of Felix the nurse (Marc Anthony Samuel), his former patient Lucas (Ryan Carnes), and Brad the lab technician (Parry Shen), as the former two stayed up all night—shirtless, of course—drinking wine and watching their fave eighties sitcom. Later, when Lucas introduced the show to his recently discovered dad, Julian (William deVry), he was able to bond with Port Charles’s tough mobster over their own mutual appreciation of The Golden Girls; GH’s episode on New Year’s Day 2015 then found the father and son hanging out on the couch together, debating about whether to watch a football game or a marathon of their favorite sitcom.
As GH’s former head writer Ron Carlivati explains, The Golden Girls proved to be a useful story device not only in bringing together an otherwise disparate father and son, but also in playing out the beats of gay romance. At various points, the three gay characters played the inevitable game: Which Golden Girl Are You? But sometimes, The Golden Girls brought these guys a bit too close. “We had Brad, who was jealous, deliver a speech where he said, ‘Oh, please—watching The Golden Girls is basically the equivalent of gay foreplay! The next thing you know, you’ll be watching Knots Landing, and then heading for the altar!”
The Golden Girls references have proven popular among the soap’s fans, who immediately expressed their approval on Twitter. But interestingly, Ron notes, “Some of our audience was surprised, not knowing that The Golden Girls is something that’s popular in gay culture. I had thought that the link was something well documented, so it was funny to see that a lot of our young, female fans didn’t realize that.” After Ron then tweeted some links to web articles about gays and The Golden Girls, he was happy to see the show now bringing together different demographic groups within his GH fan base as well. “I got a really nice response from at least one fan, who said, ‘Cool, I didn’t know that! You learn something new every day!’”
Ben DeLaCreme in her winning Golden Girls gown on the sixth-season premiere of Logo’s RuPaul’s Drag Race, February 24, 2014.
Photo courtesy of WORLD OF WONDER.
“Girls” Will Be Girls
AT THE SAME time the Girls were bringing together daytime’s men, they were also being celebrated by the queens of Logo’s hit reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race. In the main challenge at the heart of the show’s sixth-season premiere in February 2014, seven contestants were assigned boxes of mystery materials themed to various TV shows and tasked to create couture. Six of the boxes related to current hits, such as Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, and Duck Dynasty; The Golden Girls was the only classic.
The season’s eventual runner-up, Adore Delano, hinted at wanting to get her hands on the Golden box. But it was instead given to Ben DeLaCreme, whose pastel paean to the Girls went on to triumph over tributes to pop culture flashes-in-the-pan Honey Boo Boo and the Kardashians. A Connecticut native now based in Seattle, Ben had first begun watching The Golden Girls with friends while in college in Chicago, and was secretly thrilled when the Miami-themed box landed in her lap. Inside, Ben recalls, “were lots of fabrics that looked like the décor of the Girls’ living room, a mix of muted pastels and then bright patterns with flowers and palm fronds.” In creating the week’s winning gown, Ben looked past “the surplus of flamingo memorabilia, both cardboard and stuffed,” but did take advantage of one key item: an actual cheesecake.
Although much of the footage was edited out of the finished episode, Ben worked the runway, plate in hand, offering bites to the judges while sneaking some for herself. Although some of the other competitors eschewed props they found gimmicky, Ben explains, “It would have been such a missed opportunity not to use that cheesecake. It gave me the opportunity to create a glamorous look but also be a little silly about it, too.”
A drag veteran for over a decade before entering the Drag Race, Ben admits that in her earliest days “my character was a bitch. I think that’s the thing a lot of young queens turn to first.” But later, both Ben and his alter ego began to find feminine inspiration elsewhere. In another scene cut from the season-premiere episode, Ben chatted with RuPaul in the show’s workroom about the origins of his character’s now sugary-sweet personality. “Right away, Ru asked which Golden Girl I thought I was,” Ben remembers. “And so I said that I myself am Dorothy, definitely more cynical and pessimistic, but Ben DeLaCreme is Rose. She is willfully ditzy—smart sometimes, but ‘dumb’ when it serves her not to understand what’s going on.” Rose was “definitely a big influence on my drag persona,” Ben explains. So it was no surprise when Ben DeLaCreme would eventually be named the winner of the season’s Miss Congeniality crown.
Golden Tributes
AS MUCH AS the Girls continue to pop up on the TV screen, they’ve served as muses to several singers as well. Drag diva, comedienne, and superfan Jackie Beat was looking to honor the Girls, and knew she’d found the right base for a parody song in David Bowie’s hit “Golden Years” (her 2009 version called, of course, “Golden Girls”). A year later, she tweaked Nina Simone’s anthemic “Four Women.” Ever since, “I often end a show with ‘Four Girls,’ and by the time I get to Dorothy at the end, people are usually hooting and hollering,” says Jackie.
Growing up overseas, another lifelong fan, Jonny McGovern, relied on bootleg Golden Girls videos in Thailand, and later, episodes his stateside grandmother would record on VHS tape and mail to him in Egypt. The singer and comedian, known from his stint on Logo’s Big Gay Sketch Show and his current Internet talk show Hey, Qween on theStream.tv, released in 2012 his album The Gayest of All Time, which included an ode to his favorite slut. “‘Blanche Devereaux’ was a pop song about how a boy made me feel like her,” Jonny remembers. “I peppered it with as many Golden Girls references as I possibly could—singing at the Rusty Anchor, how I wanted a guy to come sit on my lanai, and so many other double entendres the show was famous for.”
“Blanche Devereaux” proved such a success that soon after, Jonny and his producer, Adam Joseph, birthed a follow-up EP, Songs About “The Golden Girls.” That album’s song salutes to the other Girls included “Zbornak,” which he calls “a new wave anthem to Dorothy and her fashion,” and “Take Me to St. Olaf,” the music video which depicted Jonny frolicking in a field with his beloved blonde and striding down the driveway of the Girls’ “real-life” Brentwood, California, house—not necessarily with the current owners’ knowledge or permission. This reverie about Rose “required the most research of all, to get all of her weird Scandinavian references right,” Jonny reveals. “And I enjoyed that research enormously.”
“TAKE ME TO ST. OLAF”
by Jonny McGovern
They don’t understand you,
Always telling you to shut your mouth.
But I’m here to tell you true,
I love it when I hear you talk about
Petunia the pig, and Bessie the cow,
The herring circus that got shut down,
And the time that you lost out on being
Butter Queen.
Take me to St. Olaf
Right next to St. Gustav
We’ll get there by toboggan
Play a game of whackanoggin
Take me to St. Olaf
We’ll frolic in the snow
Take me to St. Olaf
It’s where I wanna go
(Oh Rose, you and me can get together
With Ollie Neutensprinkle for a spirited game
of Googenspritzer
Then we’ll run off behind the barn
And do a sock puppet retelling of
Toonder the Tiger.
Ah, I can just imagine a perfect day
in St. Olaf!)
As soon as the rooster crows
We’ll meet up with Big Sven and Little Sven,
Have some eggs gerflaffelen
And pigs in a svooblaten,
See A Christmas Carol with a
non-chicken cast,
Play oogle and flugel until the
last person’s passed,
Visit Broom Hilda, your favorite pig,
And we’ll celebrate Hay Day,
Which is a day where you celebrate hay.
Hey!
Take me to St. Olaf
Right next to St. Gustav
We’ll climb Mount Roosenbaden
And eat some floogenflaben
Take me to St. Olaf
We’ll frolic in the snow
Take me to St. Olaf
It’s where I wanna go
(You know, some people don’t understand
how I feel
But those people can blow it out their
tubenburbles
Like Rose said, “Geflectenflaffen, fleffen
fleuven
Va flecten flug, ger flaffen!”)
In September 2014 came the latest audiovisual tribute to the Girls, titled Out on the Lanai; within less than a year, the weekly podcast already boasted over seventy-five thousand downloads. Each installment features writer/comedian hosts H. Alan Scott and Kerri Doherty, plus special guests such as Grace Helbig, Baron Vaughn, and Buzzfeed’s Louis Peitzman, offering their own comedic commentary on a particular Golden Girls episode. Bringing the ladies of the eighties to a twenty-first-century hipster crowd, Out on the Lanai recorded several of its episodes live in front of an aficionado crowd at NerdMelt, a comedy programming series at the Nerdist Showroom within Los Angeles’s Meltdown Comics.
Golden Goods
BY THE FALL of 2015, exactly thirty years after The Golden Girls’ debut, the show’s fan page on Facebook would amass over 1.6 million likes. On Twitter, over a dozen accounts tweet daily about Golden Girls news and quotes, with a combined follower total in the tens of thousands. But with all this contact we fans still have with the Girls in our everyday lives, it’s surprising that there has never been much official Golden Girls–themed merchandise available for purchase. For all these lost years, picture the pepperonis the Sophias among us could have been packing into our Golden Girls lunch boxes, or the wear we Blanches could have been getting out of our Golden Girls bedsheets! Luckily now, the Internet has again changed everything; where mass manufacturing has long neglected us, we fans have started doing it for ourselves.
These days, any random visit to the website Etsy.com yields offers of thousands of often homemade Golden goods, including the typical T-shirts and magnets, earrings and charm bracelets—but also greeting cards and postcards, mugs, wallets, makeup bags, neckties, stickpins, coasters, tote bags, tutus, baby onesies, paperweights, pocket mirrors, Christmas ornaments, clocks, switch plates, nightlights, wineglass charms, lip balms, fingernail decals, oil paintings, prayer candles, and even Russian nesting dolls. A Golden Girls birthday party kit comes complete with invites, banners, place cards, cupcake decorations, and thank-you notes—all bearing the faces of the foursome. Supposed ads for the Rusty Anchor and Shady Pines are immortalized in cross-stitch, as is an ode to the Great Herring War. For $140, there’s a silver and brass, quasi-religious medal, bearing a native of St. Olaf rather than an actual saint; the same artist offers a set of cufflinks, similarly hand carved with the image of Stan Zbornak. If you have the $210, you’d have to be a yutz not to want them.
The Out on the Lanai podcast, the brainchild of its writer/comedian hosts, H. Alan Scott and Kerri Doherty.
Design by JOE BENNETT, courtesy of H. ALAN SCOTT GETTY IMAGES.
In early 2015, New York-based toy company executive Sam Hatmaker assembled this Golden Girls tableau, stealing Blanche’s hair from Professor Umbridge in a Harry Potter play set, and the house’s beige bricks, an otherwise rare LEGO hue, from Star Wars. Soon after the forty-year-old Michigan native uploaded photos of his proposed kitchen/living room play set onto the company’s “Ideas” web submission page, news of his creation went viral on Facebook and in the blogosphere. Sam’s project handily scored the required ten thousand votes to proceed to official consideration, but ultimately, by the fall, LEGO declined to put the Girls into production. Still, he enthuses, “In the end I really did build it for myself, just for fun, just because I wanted it. It’s still put together, and it’s probably going to sit on my shelf forever. So any attention that it got after that was just icing on the cheesecake.”
Photos by SAM HATMAKER
Golden Galley
IN 2013, NEW York’s venerable auction house Christie’s hauled in $1.9 million for John Currin’s 1991 painting Bea Arthur Naked. (Fans thought they’d learned the identity of the anonymous telephone buyer when a week later, comedian Jeffrey Ross—who had infamously joked about Bea’s body parts during the 1999 Friars Club Roast of Jerry Stiller, broadcast on Comedy Central—tweeted a photo of himself with the painting, with a thank-you message to his generous benefactor, Jimmy Kimmel. But Jimmy replied with a tweet denying the purchase—and so the mystery continues.)
In the summer of 2007, years before the Currin sale made national headlines, Lenora Claire was also garnering press attention for curating the erotic art show Golden Gals Gone Wild. Outlets like CNN, NPR, NBC News, the National Enquirer, and TMZ reported how, inspired by yet a different topless Bea Arthur painting by Chris Zimmerman that she scored for a mere $110 on eBay, the onetime performance artist brought together over forty of the day’s up-and-coming artists for a four-week exhibition in the heart of Hollywood. Over two thousand curious art fans crowded the show’s opening night at the World of Wonder gallery, where original works were priced between $50 and $4,000. Then in 2009, a second edition of the show, featuring all-new art, sold out at the World Erotic Art Museum in the Girls’ hometown of Miami, and landed Lenora and company on the cover of the Miami New Times.
Today, just as the Girls continue to rack up tributes from writers and singers, they inspire today’s foremost visual artists as well. And so here, in this Gallery of the Girls, is a roundup of recent works of Golden Girls inspiration.
LENORA CLAIRE’S HIT EROTIC ART SHOW GOLDEN GALS GONE WILD
Canadian-born artist Glen Hanson’s popular 2006 Golden Girls caricature has been turned into T-shirts (www.huntees.com/glenhanson), mugs, greeting cards, Christmas ornaments, and even a shower curtain (www.sallyandmitch.com).
GLEN HANSON • LOS ANGELES • INK ON PAPER • 2006 • WWW.GLENHANSON.COM
Mike Giblin, a character designer for the British network ITV’s 2015 sketch show Newzoids, is a lifelong Golden Girls fan who as an artist has always admired the characters’ clearly defined personalities, which lend themselves to caricature.
MIKE GIBLIN • NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK • THE GOLDEN GIRLS-THE ANIMATED SERIES • DIGITAL • 2008 • WWW.MIKEGIBLINILLUSTRATION.COM
Instead of erotic art, Trevor Wayne decided to put the Girls in the world of “cos-play.” “So instead of being extreme, this piece has become definitely the most popular of all my paintings,” he explains.
TREVOR WAYNE • LOS ANGELES • GOLDEN HEROES • ACRYLIC ON CANVAS • 2014 • WWW.TREVORWAYNE.COM
As another sign of the show’s continuing international appeal, the Girls number among the caricatures the Australian artist Erin Hunting emblazons on prints and T-shirts and then ships all around the globe.
ERIN HUNTING • MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA • DIGITAL DRAWING • 2015 • WWW.ERINHUNTING.COM
Inspired by his memories of watching the show each night with a “punk as f---” roommate who owned her own record store, Jesse Beamesderfer combined The Golden Girls with the look of the ’70s band KISS. “To me, the Golden Girls are rock and roll, and will always remind me of Stacey ‘Vertigo,’” he explains.
JESSE BEAMESDERFER • PHILADELPHIA • PEN AND INK • 2012 • WWW.MOEBIUSGOLDBERG.COM
Originally created for a client in Canada, Barry Belcher’s illustration of the Girls around their kitchen table proved so popular on the artist’s website that he painted this second, almost identical work, titled Cheesecake Roundtable.
BARRY BELCHER • ATLANTA • CHEESECAKE ROUNDTABLE • ACRYLIC ON STRETCH CANVAS • 2012 • WWW.BARRYBELCHER.COM
“I was going through a phase of spoofing the masters with pop culture,” says Sam Carter of his mash-up of Botticelli and Bea Arthur. “This is probably one of my more shocking pieces. People either love it or hate it, but it definitely gets them to stop and look.”
SAM CARTER • ORANGE COUNTY, CA • THE BIRTH OF ZBORNAK • ACRYLIC ON CANVAS • 2009 • WWW.SAMCARTERART.COM
Sarah Hedlund conceived this piece as a tribute to both the Girls and to the Czech art nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha, “combining two of my pop culture favorites,” she explains. “I grew up watching The Golden Girls with my mom. I always wanted to create my own fan art, adding little details like the ! in the door that other super fans would appreciate.”
SARAH HEDLUND • LONE TREE, IOWA • DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION • 2015 • WWW.SARAHHEDLUND.COM
In 2014, former Golden Girls writer/executive producer Marc Cherry commissioned this drawing from New York artist Ken Fallin, whose work has appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal and Playbill
KEN FALLIN • NEW YORK • INK ON PAPER • 2014 WWW.KENFALLINARTIST.COM
A Bea a Day Allows an Artist to Play
IN FEBRUARY 2013, lifelong Golden Girls fan Mike Denison painted a homemade birthday gift for a friend featuring the Girls. A tile installer by day who trained as an artist at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mike was looking for a creative project and, partly inspired by John Currin’s topless Bea Arthur painting fetching nearly two million dollars, set out to create Bea-related art every day for a year.
Mike’s Bea a Day project, begun on his thirty- fifth birthday that September, took Bea and the rest of the Girls out of the kitchen and into more abstract settings: floating through space with a piece of cheesecake, or a Tarantino-style poster for a movie called Kill Stan. After brainstorming an initial list of over a hundred Bea-related ideas, “I knew the project would be sustainable, whether the works would just be straight homage to Bea, or be parodies, or even just bad puns,” Mike explains. “I enjoyed getting to challenge myself—especially because as soon as the idea came to me, it also came with a set of rules that I can’t explain. First of all, I had to create a new piece every single day. Second, I would never do anything tasteless. Yes, people suggested bad puns, and I’m open to that. But the idea could never be too much of a stretch.”
Mike had sold some of his prints at a comic book convention in Portland, Maine, and scored rave reviews first from Golden Girls superfan Dave Rubin, formerly the face of Logo TV’s weekly web series The Golden Girls Ultimate Fan Club and now host of Ora.tv’s The Rubin Report, and then on the Huffington Post’s Arts and Culture page. Soon after, Mike made his works from Bea a Day available as prints and T-shirts on his store page on etsy.com (www.etsy.com/shop/BeaADay).
Painted as a birthday gift for a friend, this “take on a classic Star Wars movie poster” became the inspiration for Mike Denison’s eventual Bea a Day and Betty a Day art projects.
Since then, the iPhone game Busy Bea, which features Bea a Day art, has racked up over ten thousand downloads, and the illustrations have been featured on the web’s hippest news and culture sites. But the best part of his newfound fame, Mike avows, has been “the fan community I’ve fallen into. You’ve heard of the ‘Bronies.’ Well, I’m calling this group my fellow Broldens.”
Girls Beneath the Skin
SOME GOLDEN GIRLS art has been preserved on quite a different type of canvas. On an April 2015 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host surprised guest Betty White with a type of tribute she’d never before seen. Courtesy of his video Wall of America, Jimmy introduced Betty to nine fans whose bodies bear her image. “Oh no! And you have to live with that all the time?” Betty exclaimed playfully, upon seeing a reproduction of her face with the words STAY GOLDEN upon the calf of a woman named Morgon, of Logan, West Virginia.
Los Angeles resident H. Alan Scott, host of the podcast Out on the Lanai, was next up to show his idol the image of all four Girls on his left arm. Then, Jimmy had a question for the then-ninety-three-year-old star, in reaction to further displays from Stephen, of Heber Springs, Arkansas; Gretchen, of Austin, Texas; Carl, of Ontario, Canada; Shawn, of Troy, New York; Maren, of Champaign, Illinois; Tiffany, of Mims, Florida; and Adrian of Houston, Texas:
“How does that make you feel?”
“It makes me feel wonderful . . .” Betty quipped. “And so glad that I’m not them.”
Writer/comedian Eliot Glazer shows off his Bea Arthur “Thank You For Being a Friend” tattoo.
Bea Arthur is on the menu at the Big Gay Ice Cream shop.
Golden Dessert
THEY’VE BEEN MUSES to artists, and their likenesses have graced every product from baseball hats to bangle bracelets. But ever since 2010, several of the cheesecake-loving Girls have also been the inspirations for their own desserts.
A year after Doug Quint and Bryan Petroff began driving their Big Gay Ice Cream truck around the streets of Manhattan in 2009, the two consulted with the Twitter-verse to come up with catchy names for the company’s signature confections. For one particular menu item—a golden-yellow cone filled with golden vanilla ice cream, drizzled with brownish-gold dulce de leche, and topped with golden Nilla wafer crumbs—one fan suggested the “Golden Girl.” At just that moment, Doug remembers, Bea Arthur’s historic bequest to New York’s Ali Forney Center was announced in the press. And so they dubbed the “Bea Arthur” in her honor, with some proceeds going to the charity providing housing for homeless LGBT youth.
Sales immediately jumped—and so in 2011, as the entrepreneurial duo opened their first brick-and-mortar store in New York’s East Village, they prevailed again on the power of the Girls. “We don’t normally start with a name and then come up with the recipe after,” Doug admits. “We would never set out to make a Lady Gaga cone and then figure out what should go in it.” But for the Rue McClanahan, the Big Gay owners made an exception. “We knew we wanted to come up with something that Blanche might have served to Big Daddy,” Doug explains. And with that, bourbon came to mind. “It was as if we channeled Blanche, and could hear her in our heads describing in her Southern accent the ingredients of this icecream sandwich: praline-pecan cookies and bourbon ice cream.”
The Bea Arthur has since been featured on the Food Network, and the Rue McClanahan has become the three Big Gay Ice Cream shops’ top-selling ice-cream sandwich. But, Doug notes, the other two Girls are not to be neglected. The company, whose policy is to name its treats after only the deceased, opted to honor Betty White by commissioning artist Jason O’Malley to create a five-foot-by-five-foot Warhol-esque portrait for its Philadelphia store. Jason’s smaller, similar depictions of Estelle Getty hang in both Philly and New York—and an Estelle-themed frozen dessert, some form of ice-cream-filled cannoli, is being concocted.
Artist Jason O’Malley’s rendition of Sophia in Big Gay Ice Cream’s shop in New York City’s West Village.
Photo by ELIO T GLAZER. Photos by DOUG QUINT.
Even in the company’s earliest days, as Doug manned the window of its first truck, he would make sure the beloved icon got her propers. “Not very often, but occasionally, someone would have waited in line for half an hour, and then would get to the window and ask for the ‘BEE-ya’ Arthur or the ‘BAY-ya’ Arthur,” Doug remembers. “And a couple of those times, I made the person go to the back of the line and research her on his phone, so that by the time he got to the window again he could give me a three-sentence dissertation on Bea Arthur and who she was.” But more often on such occasions, Doug notes, “When someone would order the Bea Arthur by the wrong pronunciation, I could just stand back and laugh. Because anyone who didn’t know who Bea was was chastised and taught a lesson by the other customers. People wouldn’t have it. They really took this cone to heart, because they wanted to remember Bea Arthur and make sure she was always respected.”
Girls Across the Water
FOR DECADES, AMERICAN TV has borrowed concepts liberally from abroad and turned them into stateside hits; that’s how England’s Till Death Do Us Part, Man About the House, and The Office became CBS’s All in the Family, ABC’s Three’s Company, and NBC’s . . . The Office. In recent years, the process has worked in the other direction as well, with countries like Spain, Argentina, Russia, and Turkey cooking up their own versions of The Nanny, Married with Children, and Everybody Loves Raymond.
The Golden Girls was way ahead of this reversal of trend, with foreign adaptations based on Susan Harris’s concept popping up as early as 1993 with Britain’s similarly seaside- set Brighton Belles. The original Golden Girls had been such a hit in the UK that they’d performed for their fan the Queen Mum at the Royal Variety Performance in 1988; but not long after, the Brighton Belles were a surprising outright ratings flop. Since then, adaptations have continued to pop up around the world. But as they’ve debuted throughout the nineties and up to the present day, vernacular versions of The Golden Girls in Russia, the Philippines, Turkey, and Spain have been unable to last past a single season. And it’s too soon to tell the fates of the particularly faithful adaptations that have premiered in Greece and the Netherlands in just the last few years.
Of course, none of those foreign productions has benefitted from the special magic bestowed by Bea, Betty, Rue, and Estelle—how could they?—which probably accounts for the middling results. But recently, two young writers in Australia—where The Golden Girls still airs every day as well—may have found a work-around to the problem. In 2012, Jonathan Worsley and Thomas Duncan-Watt presented the stage show they penned, Thank You for Being a Friend, at Sydney’s Darlinghurst Theatre to a late-night, predominantly gay and lesbian crowd. Their original episode featuring the Girls was acted à la the off-Broadway hit Avenue Q—that is, by puppet likenesses of our beloved American leading ladies, with their corresponding humans in full view.
When the producing team of Neil Gooding and Matthew Henderson then came aboard the show, they toned down its risqué humor to broaden its appeal to a more mainstream crowd, and most importantly, requested a key bit of recasting. After witnessing the actress playing Dorothy “spending her entire night trying to force her voice down into the bottom of her shoes,” Neil remembers, the two producers had an idea: why not just cast a man? “I know some audiences laugh, and think we’re going for camp,” he explains. “But really, having a male actor produces probably a better representation of Bea Arthur than having a female trying to re-create her voice. Bea had such a unique tool, and there aren’t too many women who can find that same droll depth of voice.”
The original Australian cast of Thank You for Being a Friend, with Julia Billington as Rose, Donna Lee as Sophia, Darren Mapes as Dorothy, and Chrystal de Grussa as Blanche.
Photo by MATTHEW MANAGEMENT and NEIL GOODING PRODUCTIONS.
Thank You for Being a Friend starts with its puppets reenacting The Golden Girls’ opening credits, and proceeds through Dorothy’s battle to get Sophia to the doctor, Rose’s attempt to write a song, and Blanche’s struggle to accept her gay son’s baby via an Asian surrogate. The revised eighty-five-minute show debuted in February 2014 at Melbourne’s Theatre Works as part of the city’s gay and lesbian Midsumma Festival, then proceeded to the Seymour Centre during the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. The fall of 2015 brought a revival that toured the eastern cities of Sydney, Brisbane, Tamworth, Port Macquarie, and Canberra; then, for the latter half of 2016, the producers plan on touring the show around the United States.
Golden Girls Forever
“Right from the beginning, young people liked the show. I thought and thought about why and I finally realized it is because the show may have been about older ladies, but it was still very antiestablishment.”
-BEA ARTHUR
ON JUNE 2, 2003, Lifetime aired The Golden Girls Reunion, which drew 4.2 million viewers to become the network’s highest-rated special ever in total viewers. Among both the Women 18–49 and Women 25–54 demos, it was the top-rated cable program of the night, and among all Adults 18–49, it was the night’s number four cable show, behind only such male-dominated fare as two editions of WWE Wrestling on Spike and an episode of American Chopper. Among twentysomething Americans that evening, the now-seventysomething Girls were more popular than anything airing on MTV.
Until 2007, Nielsen did not take into account any viewership by dormitory-dwelling students; but even back in the show’s days on Lifetime, the network knew from their feedback that college kids are yet another niche audience, watching in huge numbers. Back then, Tim Brooks estimated that of the 250 to 300 e-mails the network received per month about the show, about 30 percent were from people in college or college age. And Betty White corroborates that pattern, explaining that to this day 70 percent of the mail she receives about The Golden Girls is from fans under age twenty-five.
Now, in the latter half of the 2010s, a sizable chunk of TV viewers, particularly those in the youngest, tech-savviest age demographics, has shifted to downloading and streaming their shows via the Internet or mobile devices, making tracking their consumption of any particular series much more challenging. But even as some networks are witnessing declines in their viewership on our traditional TV screens, today not one but three different cable channels are finding success by airing the Girls—each multiple times per day. After exiting Lifetime in 2009, and a brief run on WE from 2009 to 2013, the indefatigable Golden ladies have now set up shop at Hallmark, TV Land, and Logo, with each network proclaiming its positive and youth-affirming results.
Since acquiring The Golden Girls in 2009, Hallmark has aired the show multiple times per day, every day—except from early November through the end of each year, when the channel’s programming switches exclusively to Christmas movies (and its executives hear lots of complaints from Golden Girls fans looking for their fix). The show, explains Hallmark’s VP of Program Planning and Scheduling, Darren Melameth, “continues to deliver, wherever we put it.” In the age of the DVR and other forms of on-demand viewing, the show scores some of Hallmark’s strongest live viewership numbers of the day, particularly in its two-hour late-night block from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. “It’s pretty amazing,” Darren adds, “that the last episode at twelve thirty does even better than the first at eleven. The show continues to build on itself. I want to meet these women who at midnight and twelve thirty are watching The Golden Girls. These are my friends.”
Although Hallmark overall “does speak to a slightly older audience,” Darren notes, “[The Golden Girls] drops our median age ten years from the rest of our schedule.” And the lower age number doesn’t just mean that more slightly younger people are watching, the programmer explains. Mathematically, “the only way you can get a median age down into the high forties or low fifties is to have college-age people or younger watching the show.”
Hallmark might seem like an unusual choice for these youngest viewers—and an even more unusual home for a series where Blanche is wont to boast about her bedroom gyrations. And as Darren does admit, the network had to make some concessions: “‘Slut’ for Hallmark is usually a dirty word, but we let The Golden Girls get away with it.” Thematically, though, The Golden Girls fits perfectly at Hallmark, he avows, because “the show is ‘safe,’ and what I mean by that is you know it’s going to work out. Whatever conflicts they have, you know they’re going to figure it out, and together they’re going to make it.”
Actually, there is only one thing about The Golden Girls that Hallmark does have to change, slightly: each episode’s running time, from the original nearly twenty-four minutes down to cable’s typical twenty-two. But luckily, Darren says, technology has progressed to the point where “time tailoring”—i.e., subtly speeding up some scenes—allows a network nowadays to keep as much content as possible and still air a shorter show. “Of course, that’s just to a point,” he warns. “A good, long stare from Bea Arthur is important. You don’t want to speed that up.”
In 2013, The Golden Girls started airing on two different Viacom-owned networks as well—TV Land and Logo. “There are some acquisitions that are no-brainers, and this was one of them,” remembers TV Land’s SVP of Programming and Acquisitions, Jaclyn Cohen. “The Golden Girls felt like it was going to be something that made everybody happy—those who came to us for nostalgia, and those who came for originals like Hot in Cleveland.
“The Golden Girls is an evergreen, and doesn’t require a lot of work on our end to launch it,” Jaclyn explains. “It doesn’t require a lot of explaining, so we can save the explaining for our original programming.” In fact, the network is able to use The Golden Girls as its secret weapon, whipping up its loyal female audience to deliver to one of those original sitcoms. And the Girls have indeed delivered, with twenty-one million viewers watching on TV Land each month. And just as on Hallmark, Jaclyn adds, the show does particularly well on her network when it’s placed in a “stack.” On Sunday nights, TV Land airs a block of The Golden Girls “through the prime time hours, and the show builds and builds,” she says. “We like to call it our Potato Chip Strategy. You’re sitting down and enjoying the show, and the next thing you know, you’re on your third episode and you’re not going anywhere.”
TV Land’s sister station, Logo, celebrated the second quarter of 2015 as its highest-rated ever, thanks partly to The Golden Girls, one of its top-rated acquisitions. The show is one of the reliable “tentpoles” propping up Logo’s schedule, a perfect match because, with the network’s LGBT target audience, “We can embrace the irreverent humor, and our brand really speaks to some of the same tenets,” says Pam Post, SVP of Original Programming and Series Development. “We like to be inclusive and progressive, and The Golden Girls really represents that.”
Much as NBC originally found success by grouping The Golden Girls with its Saturday night neighbors for a hurricane- or moonlight madness–themed stunt, Pam notes that Logo has also fared well by scheduling the show with a creative flair. For Valentine’s Day 2015, as cinema audiences awaited the movie adaptation of the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, Logo presented its own marathon: “Four Shades of Grey.” On Grammy weekend, Logo once counterprogrammed with the “Grannies.” For the holidays—when Hallmark sends the Girls off packing presumably to St. Olaf—Logo has celebrated “A Betty White Christmas.” And in September 2015, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of The Golden Girls’ NBC debut, Logo cast RuPaul’s Drag Race queens Delta Work, Willam, Pandora Boxx, and Shangela as Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia to host a thirty-episode marathon titled “30 Isn’t a Drag.”
However the episodes are stacked or sorted, TV Land’s Jaclyn Cohen enthuses, The Golden Girls will continue to score new fans simply because “it’s laugh-out-loud funny every time. The show was always a good experience for everybody.” Whereas a smarty-pants show like Frasier might not be fun to cuddle up with before bedtime, “The Golden Girls has smart writing that’s not too heady. You get the escape that you want. And you don’t have to take notes.”
By analyzing The Golden Girls’ previous ratings results on Lifetime, Jaclyn adds, her team already knew just how popular the show was with varying ages of women. “There was a lot of discussion around college women finding the show and loving it,” she remembers.
In fact, The Golden Girls has become one of the rare shows to develop this whole new generation of devotees—a critical achievement, because nostalgia can only carry a show so far. After all, older fans eventually die off or just move on to something else. This is the reason, TV historian Tim Brooks says, why today we don’t see too many repeats—aside from I Love Lucy—of anything from the 1950s. Ultimately, Tim explains, the shows that stick around are the ones, from any era, that continue to touch and tickle new people—and that’s why he predicts that The Golden Girls will still be golden twenty years from now, just like Lucy. “Shows that remain very popular are not specific to their times. They’re just well written, about funny people. These are happy comedies for the middle of the night when you want to go to bed with your head clear. Like The Golden Girls, they’re easy-to-watch television.”