Imagine this: Michigan, September 14, 1985. A young Vietnamese girl is watching television with her grandmother on a Saturday evening. Like everyone in her refugee family, the girl enjoys TV, which often feels like an education in American life. That night, a new show named The Golden Girls airs on NBC. From the initial notes of the theme song—thank you for being a friend—the girl is captivated. Though Dorothy, Blanche, and Rose are in their 50s and Sophia is 80, the girl feels an instant connection to them. This might be because her closest bond is with her grandmother, or because she is accustomed to relating to characters who don’t resemble her. The girl cherishes everything about these women—their laughter, their play, and how they gather around food to navigate their lives. She doesn’t realize she has just watched the debut episode of what will become one of the most significant, iconic TV shows ever. She is unaware that she will rewatch The Golden Girls repeatedly, over decades of reruns, DVDs, and streaming, throughout her entire life.
Readers, I was that girl. I grew up watching these women, never stopped watching, and now, at age 50, I am almost one of them.
If you have seen The Golden Girls, you already understand its enduring strength for 40 years, outliving all its actors. The Golden Girls is centered on profound friendship and the (still pioneering) unique experience of life for women past middle age. It features sharp one-liners, exceptional comedic timing and chemistry, and a superb ‘80s Miami aesthetic. Across seven seasons, the show explores subjects like menopause, elder care, homophobia, estrangement, discrimination, and more. Yet, it consistently returns to joy, including sex, dating, food, and the refusal to be unseen. The series is about creating family from friends, and friends from family. And it heavily emphasizes the art and necessity of storytelling.
“Picture it,” Sophia often says, embarking on a tale of long-ago Sicily when she was a beautiful young peasant girl. “Back in St. Olaf,” Rose begins, and we know we’re about to enter the magical-realist world of her Minnesota hometown. Blanche reminisces about the sultry Southern landscape of her youth. Dorothy discusses her Brooklyn upbringing and her “yutz” of an ex-husband, Stan. All their stories fulfill what stories are meant to do—to form an arc, show, tell, exaggerate, elevate, teach, and ponder. They enable the women to understand one another and make sense of their own lives. After all, friendships, relationships, and intimacy are built upon the sharing of stories. I didn’t realize it then, but watching and rewatching The Golden Girls helped teach me, an aspiring writer, the value of sharing our narratives.
Growing up in a pre-Internet world, I viewed television much as I read books: to escape my own reality, and to learn about others. In those days, people structured their lives around TV schedules, not the other way around. And so I would often find myself on Saturday nights watching The Golden Girls with my grandmother, seated before a small TV that accessed network stations with an antenna. I was 8 months old when my family arrived in the U.S.; by 1985, we had spent 10 years settling into post-refugee life in the American Midwest, where, increasingly, the only time I spoke Vietnamese was with my grandmother. I thought there was nothing “Golden Girls” about her except her age, though later it occurred to me that, like Sophia, Blanche, and Rose, my grandmother was also a widow. She had embarked on new beginnings in different cities and homes. And The Golden Girls was very much about four women learning to start over.
In the final episode of season one, titled “The Way We Met,” Dorothy, Blanche, and Rose are wide awake in the middle of the night, so they eat cheesecake and recall how they became friends and housemates. As always, each woman is dressed in character: Dorothy’s robe is comfortable and practical; Blanche’s is silky and seductive; Rose’s is soft and cozy. The episode begins and ends in the kitchen, but most of it consists of storytelling through flashback scenes. This is what the women do best. Each time I return to them—this scene, this setting, this dialogue that I almost know by heart—I feel a sense of belonging.
We call it comfort watching for a reason, and for me, The Golden Girls offers the ultimate solace. I feel as though I’m being invited into their lives and onto their lanai. I comprehend their sorrows, their family worries, their relationship woes. In a very real sense, I have matured alongside them. At some point, the jokes I didn’t grasp as a child became hilariously clear. (Blanche: “I was wearing little black French lace panties bearing the words bonjour!” Pause. “Or was it bon appetit?”) The apprehension of aging, like when Dorothy wistfully states that age 40 now seems youthful to her, became more tangible.
When The Golden Girls concluded in May 1992, with Dorothy marrying and moving away, I was about to graduate from high school and proceed to college. In the finale, the women struggle to say goodbye. As Rose puts it, “What can you say about seven years of fights and laughter, secrets, cheesecake?” The fade to black is tear-inducing. Even today, it brings me to tears. To this day, I dislike that everything must conclude. The Girls are not ageless, but in the way of enduring shows and movies, they appear to exist outside of time. They are perpetually beautiful and lively, always getting into the same predicaments, telling the same wild stories from their youth.
My grandmother passed away over 15 years ago. I don’t know if she watched The Golden Girls in syndication after I left home. Sometimes I wonder if I am seeking her presence in the feeling of that show when I rewatch it. I think about those Saturday nights spent in her company, bathed in the lamplight of her room. How she would knit and I would do homework or we’d work on a puzzle together while watching TV. How gentle our world felt then, if only for half an hour.
If we are fortunate, we will all get to embody “Golden Girls.” Wouldn’t it be lovely to know that if we awoke in the middle of the night, we could don our robes—satin, cotton, terry, chenille, depending on our identity and mood—and go into the kitchen where loved ones would be ready with cake and ice cream, prepared to share stories and gossip? In The Golden Girls, there’s always an empty seat at the kitchen table. One day I realized that spot is for us, the audience. We all get to be there, sharing laughter, reflecting on the people we once knew, the individuals we once were, and the people we are still becoming. I cannot conceive of a better way to navigate the night.
