Thank You for Being a Friend

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.

There was a particular episode from the final season that really struck a chord. It was “Home Again, Rose: Part 2” (S7E24), in which Rose, too, was going to have surgery. I was glad to have the TV to myself that night—my parents were on the patio, my brother upstairs with a friend—because it meant no interruptions. Its most memorable moment came when Rose, high on anesthesia and heading to the OR, beckoned her (terrible) daughter Kirsten closer to share something. “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” she exclaimed. I found it far more hilarious as a nine-year-old than I do at 39.

I was sad when the show concluded its run, but it lived on in syndication and rejoined my rotation once my parents got cable. As an adult, I watched it again in its entirety with my ex. We even stuck around for The Golden Palace, which was only available via illicit YouTube uploads. (It currently streams on Hulu.) Later, my wife and I watched the Jean’s-a-lesbian episode, “Isn’t It Romantic” (S2E5), on one of our early dates. She asked how many episodes there were in total and I said 180. She proposed watching one or two every time we hung out at my house, which became a date-night ritual.

“If we make it all the way to the end, we have to get engaged,” she joked. Later, we gifted Golden Girls trinkets to our wedding reception guests. Every now and then, we dust off our DVDs and head back to the lanai. One go-round came in 2017, when I was again ill with Crohn’s. Things kept spiraling out of control and it was a struggle to stay out of the hospital. We watched a few episodes of The Golden Girls nightly while my wife worked beside me on the couch. I ran to the bathroom constantly, and popped Zofran to quell intense nausea. But I also had a mission: increase my caloric intake, or at least fight to keep it steady.

During crazy IBD flares, your weight can plunge precipitously. I guzzled Ensure and forced myself to eat, which wasn’t easy. None of it had much of an impact. (It took a new biologic to get things under control.) I had always loved chocolate milk made with Nesquik, and now I labored to consume more than a sip. It was during “Strange Bedfellows” (S3E7), guest-starring John Schuck as a politician who stages an affair with an unwitting Blanche for PR purposes, that my wife saw me push away a full glass. “You have to try to drink more,” she pleaded. “You’re going to end up in the hospital, with tubes.”

She knew how strenuously I wanted to avoid that—as a kid I’d been stoic about my medical ordeals, except when it came to nutrition tubes (and PICC line insertion). Nothing about “Strange Bedfellows” resonated with me as Rose’s bypass once had; that particular viewing only stands out in my memory because I felt so miserable. Glancing from my glass to Schuck’s sitcom-perfect face and back again, I grimly thought “You will never enjoy eating or drinking or life again.” With great effort, I finished maybe a third of the beverage, and started again with a new glass, and new episodes, the next night.

Like many in search of comfort viewing, we turned to The Golden Girls at the start of COVID lockdown in early 2020. We revisited it at the end of that year, when my wife’s grandmother died of the virus. We aren’t quite “Disney Adults” with our fandom; The Golden Girls is more like a warm, cozy blanket than a religion. (As mentioned in my review of Rue McClanahan’s Back to Me and You, I’m not one for religion, anyway.) It’s not the only series to have captured my heart. There are others, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, that I can watch again and again. But the girls are somehow different. Maybe it’s that, as the theme song says, they’re pals and confidantes.

Friends of Dorothy Z.

This is the introduction to our new Friends of Dorothy Z. feature, a Golden Girls episode guide. You can read our review of the pilot episode, “The Engagement,” here.

Where to watch it

All seven seasons of The Golden Girls are available on DVD. You can also stream it at Hulu and Fubo with subscriptions, or buy it by the season (or episode) on platforms like Amazon and YouTube.

^{Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.}