Muriel and I have been coworkers since our first week together. (Her name isn’t really Muriel, that’s an alias selected because she’s frequently told “You’re terrible.”) For our first year together, we worked from an office where she made new friends every day. Since then, we’ve worked from home.
Every morning, including weekends, she follows me into the office and looks at me expectantly. Her preference is obviously for an exotic wilderness assignment, maybe a bit of bird-chasing or ritual squirrel murder. Then she watches me sit at the desk and open my computer, and perhaps notices the nearby stack of ’80s celebrity tell-alls and Kristy McNichol DVDs.
First of all, yes, “Man on the Land” is a MichFest reference. I’ve found MichFest amusing since learning of it as a teenager. But when I told my wife the name I’d selected for this feature, her eyes widened. “Yes!” she exclaimed. “I know it doesn’t work since they constantly dated men, but I always thought of the girls as living on a lesbian commune.”
At that, I stared at her like she was from another planet, as often happens when someone whose prized possession is a vintage Judy at Carnegie Hall poster takes a crunchy granola spouse. In her defense, she lived for years in Ithaca; if she sees more than three unrelated women standing together, she assumes they belong to a lesbian commune.
“Man on the Land” will be an episode-by-episode reference guide to the many men of The Golden Girls. This page will be updated periodically as more Friends of Dorothy Z. recaps are posted. Alerts won’t be sent each time it is edited, so remember to check back now and then.
“Angels in Chains” isn’t just the most iconic episode of Charlie’s Angels, it’s a Matryoshka doll of sexploitation. And this time the perv-in-chief isn’t even that scoundrel, serial sexual harasser Charlie. It’s us. Nearly 50 years after it first aired—and even if you don’t consider yourself particularly lascivious—you’ll spend the first 11 minutes holding your breath, waiting for the Angels to finally land behind bars.
The case is straightforward enough: Christine Hunter (Lauren Tewis) hires Charlie to infiltrate Pine Parish Prison Farm, where her sister Elizabeth (Terry Green) disappeared. The Parish has a reputation as a place where comely young women are baselessly arrested, only to never be seen or heard from again. But without evidence of wrongdoing, the governor won’t devote resources to searching for Elizabeth.
This early part of the episode lacks Charlie’s usual ribald comments, leaving us to ponder why Sabrina’s dressed as a clownish lesbian pimp. (Kelly’s in enormous wedge heels, the type Tom Cruise might’ve worn to the Maverick premiere.) “I’ve already arranged for you three to go to prison,” Charlie cheerfully announces. Jill seems less bothered by the assignment than the others.
The Golden Girls often tackled tough social issues, like cheese ball theft.
Dorothy’s legendary animus toward ex-husband Stanley Zbornak, the subject of “Guess Who’s Coming to the Wedding?” (S1E02), was first established in The Golden Girls’ pilot episode, “The Engagement.” After describing their shotgun wedding to Rose, she bitterly detailed the dissolution of their 38-year marriage, and how he left her “for a stewardess that he met on a business trip to Hawaii.”
DOROTHY: It was her first flight. They said ‘On arrival, give the passengers a lei.’ She got confused, he got lucky, and they now live on Maui. Oh, it’s really wonderful. A 65-year-old man with gout learning to windsurf. I hope he trips on his thongs and falls into a volcano.
Let’s pause here to engage in the time-honored tradition of puzzling over a Dorothy/Stan timeline that never made sense. The elder Zbornaks were roughly the same age. Their first child was conceived when Dorothy was in high school. If they were in their mid-sixties at the start of the series, their children Kate and Michael would’ve been nearly 50. (That would also complicate Sophia’s age, which was 80 in the pilot.) A shotgun wedding over 38 years ago would put their eldest at 38 years old, plus the length of their parents’ estrangement. Instead, Kate and brother Michael are in their mid-to-late twenties circa their first appearances, and Dorothy’s said to be in her early sixties during season seven.
Vanna White’s hair was later dyed and worn by Billy Ray Cyrus.
Only a decade rooted in such material excess as the ’80s, and fueled by as much cocaine, could have given us something like Goddess of Love. How this gem escaped my attention over the years is anyone’s guess. But when Lisa, a commenter here, mentioned it, all it took was one look at the trailer and I knew I had to watch it. Now, having done so, I encourage all true fans of garbage to do the same.
This 1988 NBC telefilm opens with a title card reading “Mt. Olympus… Ages Ago.” A chagrined Zeus (John Rhys-Davies) attempts to discipline his daughter, Aphrodite (Vanna White), as wife Hera (Betsy ‘Mrs. Voorhees’ Palmer) looks on. It’s a familiar situation, you can tell, for all three of them. Before he can list her offenses, Aphrodite interrupts to chide her father for not using her preferred name, Venus.
Sophia expresses what will become her typical Blanche refrain on The Golden Girls.
Pilot episodes are tricky endeavors, particularly for sitcom writers. In 1985, when The Golden Girls premiered, they had just under 25 minutes (these days it’s 22 on network television) in which to introduce characters, provide an appropriate amount of exposition, and make us laugh enough to tune in again the next week. The Golden Girls‘ pilot episode, “The Engagement” (S1E01), written by series creator Susan Harris, accomplishes all three of those goals in style.
Helmed by the legendary Jay Sandrich, who directed 119 episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “The Engagement” benefits from the long and laughter-filled relationships viewers already had with three-fourths of its cast. Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan and Betty White not only had a slew of hit series between them, McClanahan had famously costarred with White on Mama’s Family and with Arthur on Maude—their comedic chemistry already sizzled.
The killer bee genre is a crowded one, with films like The Swarm (1978, starring Michael Caine in his “Sure, whatever, pay me in cash” phase); 1995’s Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare; and, perhaps most famously, My Girl (1991). I could go on and on. What makes this killer bee telefilm, creatively titled Killer Bees, so special, is its cast. Forget Kate Jackson and Lillian Gish, a memorable pairing in Thin Ice (1981). Here we have Kate Jackson and Gloria Swanson.
It opens with a pushy salesman pulling up to a filling station. The attendant (John Getz of Blood Simple) warns him not to trespass onto the neighboring Van Bohlen Winery property, but he does so anyway, and is summarily killed by bees. Forgive me, I’m being flippant. Technically, a swarm follows him into his car (it would’ve been funny if they had voice boxes like Richard Romanus in Night Terror), resulting in a crash and an enormous explosion. “I told him. I told the darn fool,” the gas station attendant mutters. Must happen all the time.
The Golden Girls premiered in 1985, when I was two years old. My earliest memories—of life in general, not The Golden Girls specifically—begin in 1986. That year I spent nearly a month in the hospital with inflammatory bowel disease. You wouldn’t think those disparate things, a disease and a sitcom, have anything meaningful in common. You would be wrong.
Each has been in my life forever. My mom always watched The Golden Girls, which meant that I always watched The Golden Girls. Perhaps more importantly, in 1992, as the series concluded its seven-season run, illness had again derailed my life. I was partway through the lengthy process of a three-stage total proctocolectomy with j-pouch reconstruction. It wasn’t a happy time. Third grade was one of many that mostly went on without me.
There were yet more hospital stays, and long recovery periods spent confined to bed or stuck at home on the couch, a pillow clutched to my stomach. The isolation meant a lot of reading, sometimes a book or two per day. Each Saturday I looked forward to The Golden Girls and the escape it provided. The characters felt like family, and so did the actresses. Betty White even looked like the shiksa version of my great-grandmother (minus the heavy makeup and costume jewelry), who had died two years earlier.
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Thanks for not pelting me with rotten produce for posting this!
We’re not watching outtakes from Drop Dead Gorgeous. This is all Midwest Obsession.
Try as the actors might, the only authentic performances in Midwest Obsession (1995) are those of its farm animals. That is the fault of the screenplay primarily, but I also blame the director, the producers, and possibly even society. (Were viewers not the ones demanding an endless supply of grisly movies-of-the-week during this era?) It must have been demoralizing heading to the set each day, trying to will a story this grim into existence.
We begin with a murder in a parking lot. The editing is abrupt and unsatisfying, leaving you less frightened than confused. The lighting doesn’t help; several scenes are too dark to fully keep track of what’s happening. It’s a problem that intensifies as the story unfolds. When our murderess loses control of herself, as happens now and then, the distorted shots and frenetic cuts are more suggestive of a Soundgarden music video than a movie. (The film’s fashions also aged poorly, which some of you might enjoy. If you’re in that camp, check out Gabrielle Carteris in Seduced and Betrayed, also from ’95.)
