Betty White, who died Dec. 31, was the last surviving member of the Emmy-winning foursome: Here’s how their magical chemistry came together.
Between 1985 and 1992, there was no more welcoming place to be on a Saturday night than watching Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia talk about life over slices of cheesecake.
No matter how old you were, whether you were still in your single digits or at a point where you were reminiscing about your 50s, The Golden Girls was—and remains, as evidenced by the people of all ages still tuning into reruns—a sitcom that brought families together. It was a show that you made a point of being at home to watch, sitting through commercials and everything, perhaps with one of the special golden-aged ladies in your life by your side.
One of the most delightful things about those repeats, perhaps, is all the new jokes, the ones that meant nothing when you were a kid, but that are either eerily spot-on or shockingly raunchy now. (It’s for the best that you had no idea how many sex jokes you were watching with your grandma when you were 8—but it was awesome seeing her laugh that hard.)
And though it’s been more than 36 years since The Golden Girls premiered in September 1985, and its four pitch-perfect stars are no longer with us, the dynamic relationships that Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty, Rue McClanahan and Betty White brought to the screen live on.
“You see Golden Girls on three hours a day!” Arthur marveled to E! News in 2002, 10 years after the show ended its original run. And yes, she still enjoyed watching it.
In almost every successful show—be it about solving murders, selling paper or angling for the Iron Throne (or stewardship of Waystar RoyCo)—it’s the nuances of the relationships, be they supportive and uplifting or toxic and destructive, that keep viewers coming back for more and rewatching to catch what they missed the first time.
And The Golden Girls, for all its sitcom-length cheer, had its sad, tender and fraught moments amid the delicious snark, all of it adding up to a delectable portrait of women digging into their second, or third (or fourth) chapter of life with gusto.
But when the onscreen chemistry is that good, it can be kind of a letdown to think about the actors off camera, wondering if these ladies ever lunched, if they were the Jen–Courteney–Lisa of their day or the Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker.
