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‘Golden Girls’ Aging Like A Fine Wine

Y2kTheNewOldies

Y2kTheNewOldies

https://tvnewscheck.com/article/top-news/236463/golden-girls-aging-like-a-fine-wine/

Wow interesting take given that the show has been in reruns for nearly 3 decades.

Alexandra Wilkinson was only 2 months old when “The Golden Girls” ended its television run in 1992.

But she became a fan last year while taking a course called “Women and Aging: Lessons from the Golden Girls” at California State University, Long Beach. Now she streams episodes on Hulu. She owns a “Golden Girls” T-shirt. And when she graduated recently with a master’s degree in gerontology, she decorated her cap with a picture of “Golden Girl” Sophia along with the sardonic Sicilian’s trademark phrase, “Picture it.”



“I was amazed at how this TV show from before I was born really related to so many topics I’m learning about right now,” said Wilkinson, 27. “It doesn’t even matter what they’re talking about, whether it’s a serious concept or not. Their personalities just have a way of bringing humor into everything.”

The class, which finished its second year in May, is the latest example of the surprising pop culture longevity of Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia.
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The jokes still hold up to this day, in fact I would argue that they would never get away with those jokes on network today. The show doesn't date it self because most of it took place in the house.
 
Don CT said:
The jokes still hold up to this day, in fact I would argue that they would never get away with those jokes on network today. The show doesn't date it self because most of it took place in the house.
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While All in the Family does date itself in a number of episodes, some of the banter sounds like what's going on today. Like GG, there's plenty of dialogue that NOW couldn't go on the air because of cultural sensitivities--yet back then, certain subjects were still considered taboo.
 
Part of the reason it holds up is that the elderly do not change as rapidly as younger folks.

For example, the costuming in Seinfeld looks really dated, and so do many of the sets and props. But the Golden Girls do not look so dated, because elderly ladies will still dress in pearls and pastel colored dresses and phones which are mounted to the wall.

Similarly, I can imagine the widows I've known having the same kind of conversations the Golden Girls did around their coffee table.
 
The show certainly holds up. My main gather is Hallmark in the early morning, but they don't air some of the more explicit episodes. They have every right, but it just goes to show that this show was very contemporary and relevant for the era, and didn't shy away from some major social issues of the time. Plus the chemistry of the cast was terrific and seldom had a bad episode.

The writing was terrific, and the interpretation of the script was masterfull by the main characters, who all are no longer with us except for the ever-living Betty White.
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
Part of the reason it holds up is that the elderly do not change as rapidly as younger folks.

For example, the costuming in Seinfeld looks really dated, and so do many of the sets and props. But the Golden Girls do not look so dated, because elderly ladies will still dress in pearls and pastel colored dresses and phones which are mounted to the wall.

Similarly, I can imagine the widows I've known having the same kind of conversations the Golden Girls did around their coffee table.
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That's because the humor of The Golden Girls is more or less timeless. Comparing it to All in the Family is a bit unfair to that older show. Because the show was about a bigoted conservative and included political arguments with his liberal son-in-law "Meathead," it was required that it be topical. So the talk was about President Nixon, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and other topics of that era. It's still interesting in an historical context, but most people under 50 are unfamiliar with that history.
 
My grandmother always watched The Golden Girls when it ran on NBC.
I never did because at the time that was way out of my demographic.

I came across a cable rerun about four years ago and decided to see what the fuss was about.
Krikey! Four minutes in they were hitting me with vibrator jokes! Pretty edgy stuff for 1985.
 
seatownmedia said:
The show certainly holds up. My main gather is Hallmark in the early morning, but they don't air some of the more explicit episodes. They have every right, but it just goes to show that this show was very contemporary and relevant for the era, and didn't shy away from some major social issues of the time. Plus the chemistry of the cast was terrific and seldom had a bad episode.

The writing was terrific, and the interpretation of the script was masterfull by the main characters, who all are no longer with us except for the ever-living Betty White.
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I think that some people - especially Gen X and younger, confuse the 1980's with the 1950's. But it was shows from the early 1970's like All in the Family and Maude that broke TV censorship, and allowed controversial subjects to be discussed. So by the 1980's TV content was, for the most part, just as open regarding content as broadcast TV today. Cable channels go further these days because they are not regulated by the FCC.

The only change I really see since the 1980's regards blood and guts and violence - which is much more explicit now in police procedural shows than in the 1980's. But the discussion of controversial subjects like politics, aging, sex, homosexuality - for the most part, the same...though I guess you can say that Ellen's lesbian kiss in 1997 broke an additional barrier.
 
I've seen shows that had a slur in it (like MASH) that are shown now and the word bleeped or words like "retard" and "n*gger" excised, which is stupid. Hell, the one kids network that was showing Batman a few years ago wouldn't show two shows because Native Americans were depicted in stereotypical fashion. They want to apply current restrictive standards to old shows without any context because somebody somewhere somehow MIGHT be offended.
 
BD Sullivan said:
I've seen shows that had a slur in it (like MASH) that are shown now and the word bleeped or words like "retard" and "n*gger" excised, which is stupid. Hell, the one kids network that was showing Batman a few years ago wouldn't show two shows because Native Americans were depicted in stereotypical fashion. They want to apply current restrictive standards to old shows without any context because somebody somewhere somehow MIGHT be offended.
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This has been the trend for decades. About 1962, I remember watching Amos & Andy reruns on my local (Los Angeles) CBS O&O - KNXT, now KCBS-TV, right before the 6:00 PM news. A year or two later, the show was gone, never to be seen again for obvious reasons - the Civil Rights era had truly dawned, and it was no longer OK to stereotype African-Americans in the way that show did.

Clearly, the "N" word has become more offensive in recent years, so I get why that is now censored.

My father was an animator and worked on the Dick Tracy series in the mid 1960's. But Tracy was only the straight man for the comical detectives, which included a stereotypical Mexican with a sombrero, a and a "chop-sockY" Chinese character (think Charlie Chan). You will never see these cartoons again on any broadcast network, and it's no loss to the world.
 
My late Mother loved this show, and was the only thing she could smile at after her stroke. I would watch many episodes with her and actually got sick of the show after many years. Perhaps because of the situation. Now that my mother is long gone, I go back to these episodes and have a totally new understanding and appreciation of how good this series was. I would rank it right up with the Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Cheers, Frasier sitcoms.
 
seatownmedia said:
Actually the gay housekeeper was just in the pilot. He was dropped as the first season started. Coco was just on the pilot.
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The original plan was that Sophia would be a recurring character, living at/visiting from Shady Pines, and Coco would have the outrageous jokes every week. But Estelle Getty kind of stole the show in the pilot, so we never saw Coco again(maybe he set fire to Shady Pines!).
 
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