Thank You For Being A Friend
How The Golden Girls Has Returned Like Ibsen in a Floridian Retirement Community
There was a brief period in my childhood (I’d say of around 35 minutes) where I knew the words to the Welsh national anthem. It was taught in my primary school, the aim being to imbue a bunch of toddlers with a boilerplate verbal badge of patriotic pride (and give us the shibboleth of rugby international days). Being at a Newport school in the 1980s, a town where the sound of the Welsh language was about as common as the sight of a red kite over Brynglas Tunnels, I didn’t speak it or understand it. None of us did. I dare say, not even the teacher instructing us in the lyric. I don’t remember ever being taught what a word of the anthem meant. So, I could sing it, mimicking the sounds, for approximately half the lesson in which it was taught, and then… poof… it was gone. We could go into some detail about why I allowed it leave me – the fact I have no tract with nationalism, the fact I don’t speak Welsh, that the song is a top notch national anthem, but it’s just a national anthem, and it’s hardly “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. But the reason why I was thinking of this is because I’ve been recently reintroduced to a few songs that are from the same period in my life, and yet the words are as fresh and clear to me now in my forties as they were when I was kneehigh. And one of those is the theme tune to The Golden Girls. It seems that while my country’s national anthem was wispily escaping the “identity cortex” of my brain and making for the nearest permanent exit, I was committing to a secure memory chamber the theme tunes of American sitcoms.
For a few decades, my laurels in this department rested on “Where Everybody Knows Your Name”, Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo’s paean to loveable losers that opened the classic Ted Danson vehicle, Cheers. This is mainly because on the surface it speaks of a pub culture I’ve been intimately familiar with since I was about 16. In my local pub in Newport, The Murenger House, we used to sometimes sing it both ironically and non-ironically, depending on the mood of the evening. But just the last week or so, I’ve been reminded of the spiritual uplift of the marvellous Cynthia Fee cover of the Andrew Gold song, “Thank You For Being a Friend”. It came up on the TV screen and I knew the words. I knew the melody. It opened up a portal to my childhood, an innocent Proustian slip.
The Golden Girls, for the uninitiated, is a sassy all-woman sitcom that became an unlikely global mega-hit (who wants to watch a half hour comedy about a bunch of old women house-sharing?) in the 1980s. I used to watch it religiously with my mother on Friday nights while my dad was down the pub. Snacks, sofa, cwtched up, American sitcoms. My formative Fridays between 9pm and 10:30pm. Cheers, Roseanne, The Golden Girls, M.A.S.H., probably others. Looking back, my mum was clearly more into the smart-mouthed powerhouse women of Roseanne and The Golden Girls (she also had. thing for Laverne and Shirley on school holiday mornings), than she was into the ritual humiliations of Hot Lips Houlihan in M.A.S.H. or the embattled struggles of Diane or Rebecca or Lilith in Cheers, but she sat with me through those anyway. This late night end of the week ritual was a staple for me growing up, and I see now, was a major part of my cultural education, a seed of a grand old bushel that would eventually see me drop out of University after one term when I was eighteen to run off to America with a notebook and guitar slung over my shoulder to live out some beatnik Woody Guthrie inspired fever dream. But that itch to go bumming around Stateside wasn’t just a whim brought on by reading Desolation Angels or listening to Freewheelin’, it was something traceable back there when I was the cutest toddler in a country mile cwtching up to my mum and watching these sitcoms. They fused with my grandfather reading me Last of the Mohicans, with me watching Edward G Robinson and John Wayne movies on the matinee slot on Saturday TV, watching Tom and Jerry cartoons, Star Wars, Steve McQueen, Elvis, and all the rest of it.
I’m thinking of this now because Disney+ has just put out the entire of The Golden Girls, siphoned from some dusty corner of its media empire and presumably flung out to be pecked at by nostalgia vultures like me. I’ve been watching it, and I’ve been surprised at how clear it all is to me, more than thirty years after last seeing it. It’s clear, but also it bursts with elements I hadn’t considered in all that time. Little character idiosyncrasies that were so part of my own cultural sphere when I was a child, the tidbits that made those characters so full, and made them so funny. And things I will never know if I ever knew, because it’s doubtful I would have understood back then. Little things: Sophia (Estelle Getty), Dorothy’s acid-tongued tiny old mother is acid-tongued because just before the pilot episode she has suffered a stroke that has broken down any filter in her brain for social propriety. Never knew that. Thought she was just too old to care what people thought. You know: the old person condition. But big things too: just how terrified and vulnerable these four women are throughout the show. They are financially vulnerable, emotionally vulnerable, and vulnerable, always, to the sexual machinations of men, men who prowl the peripheries, retired lotharios in plimsoles and double breasted suits, forever trying to pick off one of the girls, fragment the sisterhood, drive wedges between them, promising stability and untold happiness as arm candy for the leathery fraternity of the Floridian sect of God’s waiting room. The Golden Girls was never just about four funny older women living together, it was about four funny older women living together without men, in spite of men, four older funny women continuously fighting off the impulses within themselves to find a man and society’s compulsion to have them attached to one. The lesson at the end of every episode is that they are stronger together, that this set-up is not a transient scenario. They have what they need: each other.
The set-up of The Golden Girls is quite simple, and something of a comedy/drama staple. A selection of seemingly incompatible characters are forced to share a confined space. The conflicts resultant of this provides both the comedy and the dramatic moments, (about which more later). It’s pretty much Ibsen if Ibsen had retired to Florida in the 1980s. It’s Ibsen with Groucho Marx zingers.
The girls, who are each hilarious – there’s no straight “man” here – are richly drawn, from distinctly different backgrounds. Dorothy (Bea Arthur) is a New York Italian American, a fifty-five year old supply teacher, left in the lurch when her husband of 38 years, Stan, runs off with someone half his age; her mother, Sophia, who comes to live with them after her retirement home burns down, is Sicilian born, hard-as-nails, fearless. Blanche Devereaux (it’s French for “Blanche Devereaux”), played with ubersass by Rue McClanahan, owns the house the others lodge in, the one in which the show takes place, and is a widow of wealthy Georgian plantation stock. Her given name evokes Tennessee Williams, and she’s every inch the southern belle aged, clinging to her long gone youth. There is much humour surrounding her “dating” life. She’s given a rich history of “looseness” (as it used to be called), and within the first few episodes she is variously called “a slut” and “a prostitute” (actually, Sophia says she’s dressed like one when all she has on is a lace summer dress and a face of make-up). Rose (Betty White) is from midwestern Norwegian-American agricultural lineage, and as the show evolves, so does the absurdity of the anecdotes she tells about life growing up on the farm, full of unusual deformed animals and names that bask in the comedic possibilities of those Scandinavian sounds. The girls are a smorgasbord of American immigrant history, and they live very much in the throes of those origin identities. They each continually hark back to them, almost as much as they hark back to their former identities as wives and mothers. They come from very different places, but are all in the same place now. They are all reluctantly respectful of each other’s anecdotes – even of Rose’s who gets to tell hers despite the eyerolls. Rose is the dumb one. Her misunderstanding of conversational nuances, her naivety, implicitly born of her isolated background, is the butt of some of the show’s best gags and biggest live audience belly laughs. All four of them in this way fill their comedic roles and never break free of them. Dorothy is hard and smart, Sophia is brusk, Blanche is self-obsessed, Rose is stupid. But they all have heart, and they all have our heart, too.
Here’s some favourite quotes that give a real taste of the characters:
“Your competitiveness has always been your worst feature… no, wait, your ears are your worst feature, but your competitiveness is right up there.” [Sophie to her daughter, Dorothy]
"It is not easy being a mother. If it were easy, fathers would do it." [Dorothy]
“My first was Billy. Oh, I’ll never forget it! That night under the dogwood tree, the air thick with perfume, and me with Billy. Or Bobby? Yes, that’s right, Bobby! Or was it Ben? Oh, who knows, anyway, it started with a B.” [Blanche]
"It's like we say in St. Olaf—Christmas without fruitcake is like St. Sigmund's Day without the headless boy." [Rose]
Back to that business of the heart. It seems clear now that it’s the drama that makes The Golden Girls that little bit more special than its counterparts (and, dare I say it, many of its descendants). At the centre of the show, as I’ve explained, is the bond of the four women (okay, so the three women + Sophia, who was originally intended to be a regular guest star but tested so well with audiences on the pilot she was kept as a core cast member; it’s a credit to the programme makers that they manage to make that imbalance a strength of the show). But it wouldn’t do to have the experiences that bungee them back to one another episode after episode to be solely comedic ones. And so, for the first season at least, every episode has at its fulcrum a serious dramatic strand. In one episode, Dorothy has to confront her ex-husband’s betrayal when her daughter announces she is getting married. The moment of “closure” between Dorothy and Stan is genuinely moving. In another, Blanche has to confront her own role as a mother when her tearaway grandson comes to stay. In the episode where the girls come home to find they have been victims of a burglary, Rose gives an impassioned speech without a punchline, declaring that “this is because we are without men. All I know is, when I was married, when the lights went out at night I felt safe.” Next scene, a man in shirt and tie is upselling them security equipment, preying on their raw fears for profit. It’s Dorothy who clocks on and kicks him out, saying, “Get out before the next victim of violent crime in this house is you.” They have each other. Women constantly pulled toward the falsehood that they need men. They never resist this idea, but they always find that the reasons to dismiss it are real and right in front of them.
Okay, so maybe the idea that The Golden Girls as Ibsen in Florida is over-egging an already precariously soggy-bottomed pudding, but it’s difficult to deny the shared themes of women trying to fix the disjointed positions they find themselves in. The girls are on the peripheries of society, all vying to get themselves back in, consistently being reminded, and reminding themselves, that they’re better off where they are. Sound a little like Rosmerholm’s Rebecca? A little like Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s inconstant possession? Or is this all an inverse riff on Nora’s fate in A Doll’s House?
Discuss.
Some recommendations…
Watched A Quiet Place again and then A Quiet Place Part II for the first time. Was impressed how well the first film stands up. A masterclass in tension and high concept horror. Noted too how great the script is, all twenty lines of it. The sequel, which is getting great reviews, is diminished by its increased verbals, but still is a superior thriller. Somehow though, it feels slighter than the first. Would work well as the centre piece of a trilogy.
Read Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, and was interested that although it ticks a lot of boxes for my interests in American fiction, it left me a little cold. Jesse Singal, on his podcast Blocked and Reported (highly recommend), once said he loved Lerner’s books because he is also from Topeka and maybe you have to be from there to really get hooked.
Listened to Imperial Wax Solvent by The Fall after being reminded of its existence by a Twitter thing, and now I’m pretty sure it’s my favourite Fall album. Big claim. But not an important one.