Fred and Loathing on The Internet

You know what they say: You can lead a herring to water, but you have to walk really fast or he’ll die.

2024-Sep-22

Having me review the 1980s American TV series The Golden Girls can ultimately become a review of the sitcom format itself. The very observational tools I have for evaluating a sitcom comes from watching this show. Glimmers of that television show are some of my first viable memories. The timing of jokes, the din of the audience laughter, the reassuring music at the credits; all the components I expect from a sitcom all first instantiated in my brain from repeat viewings (or listening from the sound of the TV in the living room seeping through to my bedroom) of The Golden Girls.

Golden Girls exalts itself in my mind at the Ur of TV sitcoms in my thoughts for the very conditional response I have for hearing credits music to this show, and for the stories underneath this glowing sensational bank of memories. The soaring lyrics of ‘Thank You For Being a Friend’ at the end or beginning of the broadcast of The Golden Girls still puts a subtle electric tingle in my bones. This tingle touches the basest emotions I can ponder.

Possibly M.A.S.H. could take the crown as the very first imprint of a sitcom in my brain. If it may be the first, decades later I have more of a hankering to watch balmy Miami in the 80s for my cheap TV jokes, not The Korean War. The local TV affiliates where I grew up had plenty of M.A.S.H. episodes to broadcast and my parents were just the type to watch them; especially around my bedtime. The broadcast schedule of these two shows were the Pavlovian bells of my childhood that triggered the scheduling of pre-bedtime activity.

Despite M.A.S.H. being a more likely ‘first’ in my brain showing the canned laughter pattern of sitcoms, Golden Girls was the first where I could understand enough of the jokes for me to care why the unseen audience laughter responded to what the onscreen characters said. It had a chance to become something I remember as more than just environmental stimuli.

Perhaps it was a matter of a generational gap. M.A.S.H. did a good job of making jokes about the Korean War broad enough for most Americans at the time to enjoy. None of those jokes landed on me as a six year old watching decade old reruns in the early 90s. Except for the most obvious jokes. Probably some joke about the guy who wore a dress or the blue blood colonel who was so stodgy.

Golden Girls spoke in a more contemporary language (1980s Miami) that I could understand. More often than not I could follow along on all the jokes and fill in the punchlines with context clues with the stories about four mature women cavorting about Miami and then commiserating about it in their kitchen. The archetypes of the four main characters helped my nubile mind fill in the blanks with the obviousness of the humor. The sophistication of M.A.S.H.’s writing poking fun about the war in Vietnam (in a Korean War setting mucking up the context) or the American public’s response to the war was all but lost on young me.

With that preamble introducing my biases towards what could be the greatest American television sitcom ever produced, comes in my brief thoughts on the first handful of episodes of the series. Ones that I had not watched up until now, despite the hundreds of hours across the years catching the show on TV. Recently I had re-watched the bulk of the series, but I began in the middle of the second. I thought the first season was likely to be rougher than the image I had for the show. That hankering I had for the Golden Girls was for the episodes I remember. The ones that end up in late season ‘wacky’ stuff with tons of celebrities of that era.

The first episode introduces Sofia Patrillo to the established triad of women living together as roommates. A rarely spoken chef (or butler?) makes as well in the pilot, which kick starts the series with the TV dramatics of a sudden wedding for Blanche. Blanche right away gets established as a woman that enjoys the company of men, and boy do the other characters have no compunction expressing this fact. I found the writing for each character to be jarring; with such mean words thrown around, compared to the dialogue I had seen on the last sitcom I watched over a multi-season bender: The Mary Tyler Moore Show. (Both I found out recently to have included Betty White in the cast! She plays a subtle slut on that show!)

The tenor of language over on Mary Tyler Moore show is not exactly warm when among the male coworkers, and can get testy when Phyllis the landlord shows up to interrupt the bonhomie between Mary and Rhoda. It never gets so quick and blunt with the insults. Most of all words used by Sophia when talking about Blanche in the first few episodes are forthright with the insult. Big dull swings right away like, ‘I thought you were a prostitute!’ There is less tiptoeing around the controversial punchline on Golden Girls.

Bea Arthur’s character Dorothy has a whole episode that would come off as sadistic or homicidal if it were read without any spoken intonation or audience laughter. Constant threats of murder are made by her. Mostly her sleazy and clumsy ex-husband, but she throws it around here and there when her character wants to verbally express her displeasure with somebody. She softens up a lot after these introductory episodes. It makes me curious to see her work in Maude. I’ve heard she played a very tough talking broad on that one, commensurate with her reputation as a former USMC member.

I wonder how long they keep her on this hardboiled level of dialogue. Sofia sure sounds more ‘cool tough grandma’ish than she does in the middle seasons. She kinda regains those characteristics when the show gets ‘wackier’ in the later seasons, with outlandish chances for new settings, costumes, guest stars, and new ways to call Blanche a slut or Rose a fool.