The Dark Side of ‘The Golden Girls’
Would some of the sitcom’s un-”woke” jokes have made it on air today?
Who doesn’t love The Golden Girls? The NBC sitcom was binge-worthy television before binge-watching was even a thing.
I’m old enough to have watched it sporadically during its original run, from 1985 to 1992, when high school and college took priority over TV. If that had been the end of it, I now might regard it the way I do other shows from that era, like Moonlighting and The Wonder Years: fondly remembered but notable mostly for its nostalgic value. Sitcoms like The Cosby Show and A Different World were even bigger hits at the time, and they were far more relatable and culturally significant to me.
Then something unexpected happened in the late ’90s. I got hooked on Golden Girls reruns on Lifetime. The network would air an old episode at 11pm and another right after, at 11.30, and occasionally, they’d do an entire weekend of nothing but The Golden Girls. (Am I the only one who’s always dreaded the two-part series finale, not because its bad but because it truly was the end of an era?)
A for-the-rest-of-my-lifetime love — and habit — had begun. The Golden Girls was the first time I can remember binge-watching anything, and by the time I left the United States and moved to Buenos Aires in…
