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Tag: Betty White

The Golden Girls: “Break In” Episode Recap

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On March 24, 2023

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

Rose is armed and dangerous in “Break In.”

“Break In,” the eighth episode of The Golden Girls’ first season, begins inauspiciously, with the roommates returning home from a Madonna concert. After some cursory jokes—Sophia calls her a “slut,” while Dorothy remarks “She did things on that stage I never did with my husband!”—they’re shaken to find the house was burgled in their absence.

Dorothy takes charge while the rest of the girls cower, deepening her voice and bellowing her best Dirty Harry threats. Satisfied the hoodlums have long since skedaddled, Sophia heads off to her bedroom. Blanche and Rose try to stop her, with Rose exclaiming “You can’t. It could be dangerous!”

“Please, I’m eighty,” Sophia replies. “Bathtubs are dangerous!” As Rose anxiously babbles to herself in the living room, Blanche and Dorothy check on their valuables. Dorothy’s stole, a gift from Stan, was taken, and Blanche has an announcement of her own upon exiting the kitchen, her face and blouse covered in flour.

Blanche: They got my jewels.

Dorothy: But I see they didn’t get your cocaine.

Rose: Oh, my God! Blanche has cocaine?

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The Golden Girls: “The Competition” Episode Recap

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On October 26, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

The roommates are feuding again—over a trophy this time, not a man—in “The Competition” (S1E07), the first of many contest-themed Golden Girls episodes. The B-plot’s exposition is lined up right out of the gate: Sophia is preparing what Dorothy calls her “special 14-hour sauce,” which suggests a special occasion. Rose contributes to the conversation in her typical childlike fashion, exclaiming “Oh, Sophia, that smells heavenly! Is it Chef Boyardee?”

Before any useful information can be extracted from Sophia, Blanche enters the kitchen, showing off her new bowling ball. “I bought it to help Rose and me win the bowling tournament this year,” she announces. The bowling tournament is as out of left field as Dorothy cramming for a French exam in the previous episode, but let’s not get bogged down by details.

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The Golden Girls: “On Golden Girls” Episode Recap

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On September 30, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

Blanche Devereaux is a woman of many skills—most notably, some that are impolite to discuss publicly—but it’s fair to say exemplary parenting and grandparenting weren’t among them. She acknowledges strained relationships with her (many) children more than once in the course of The Golden Girls, but we rarely see her do anything about it.

In “Even Grandmas Get the Blues” (S6E20), she pretends granddaughter Aurora, Rebecca’s baby, is her own to impress a potential suitor (Alan Rachins). A few episodes later, in “Beauty and the Beast” (S7E03), granddaughter Melissa comes to visit and Blanche forces the resentful child to participate in a pageant for her own vain reasons. As in her dealings with sister Virginia, Blanche focuses on herself to the exclusion of others, but it wasn’t always that way.

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The Golden Girls: “The Triangle” Episode Recap

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On August 19, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

“The Triangle” (S1E05) is the first Golden Girls entry in a fan-favorite sub-genre, that of the girls in competition (real or imagined) with each other. Across seven seasons we’re treated to many such episodes—including “Joust Between Friends,” “One for the Money,” “The Artist” and “The Actor,” to name a few—but “The Triangle” is where it begins, and it’s rather more vicious than playful.

Things kick off mildly enough, with Sophia announcing her intention to watch porn on a big-screen TV at a friend’s house. Dorothy tells her to stay put because a new doctor is on his way over. She’s been concerned by Sophia’s fatigue, elevated blood pressure and lack of color. “I’m an old white woman. I’m not supposed to have color,” Sophia gripes. “You want color? Talk to Lena Horne.”

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The Golden Girls: “Transplant” Episode Recap

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On August 1, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

It’s fair to say The Golden Girls was more a celebration of chosen-family sisterhood than its nuclear-family counterpart. Every last one of the girls had a contentious relationship with a sister, from Dorothy and Gloria sparring over Sophia and Stan, to Sophia’s long-running, nonsensical feud with Angela. (The less said about Angela, the better. Nancy Walker’s so hammy in the role that she belonged in a supermarket deli.)

Rose’s moment came in “Little Sister” (S4E21), when the admittedly annoying Holly (Inga Swenson) paid a visit. “God, I hate this woman!” Rose exclaimed when she arrived. Her enmity toward Holly is hard to forget during “Transplant” (S1E4), which establishes Blanche’s rivalry with younger sister Virginia (Sheree North). The episode begins with Blanche obsessively tidying an already clean house. “God, I wish she wasn’t coming. I just hate her,” she complains to an incredulous Rose.

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The Golden Girls: “Rose the Prude” Episode Recap

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On July 27, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

Betty White in a scene from “Rose the Prude.”

“Rose the Prude” (S1E03) is a bit of a clunky effort, beginning with its not entirely accurate title. (Rose is less prudish than reserved.) Not only do Dorothy and Blanche steal the spotlight in what is ostensibly the first Rose-centric episode of the series, the St. Olaf native treads similar thematic ground to more humorous effect just 12 episodes later, in “In a Bed of Rose’s” (S1E15). The subject matter is sex, which Rose hasn’t had since her husband, Charlie, died.

As the episode begins, Blanche is looking for help in salvaging a double-date. “Thanks for asking, but I don’t think so. I’m not that interested in dating anymore,” Rose tells her. Blanche isn’t buying it: “Now you know that’s not true, honey, or you’d let your hair go natural.” Rose looks annoyed in response and muses, “You know what my problem really is? I’m spoiled. I had a long and wonderful marriage with a perfect man. Everyone seems so ordinary after Charlie.”

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The Golden Girls: “Guess Who’s Coming to the Wedding?” Episode Recap

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On July 19, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

Bea Arthur, Betty White and Rue McClanahan in a scene from Guess Who's Coming to the Wedding?
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.

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The Golden Girls: “The Engagement” Episode Recap

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On July 16, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

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.

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Thank You for Being a Friend

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On July 12, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

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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Betty White’s Zany Road Trip to Annie’s Point

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On February 10, 2022

In TV Movies

Betty White poses for her mugshot in Annie’s Point.

If you ever wanted to see Betty White scam kids out of cash, go skinny-dipping, get arrested (and then break out of jail), gamble, and exclaim “Oh, poop!” at the sight of a law enforcement enforcer, today’s your lucky day! You can find it all in Annie’s Point, a 2005 Hallmark original movie about a widow’s determination to fulfill her husband’s dying wish.

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