By now, I assume you have all heard the exciting news that Hulu will begin streaming all episodes of The Golden Girls on Monday, February 13th!
My initiation to The Golden Girls began as a wee eleven year-old. The entire 6th grade had a gigantic multi-month long project that called for us to create “poetry notebooks.” Basically, we were making our own poetry anthologies and had to fill gigantic binders with poems that met certain stylistic benchmarks. We also had to write like four or five of our own poems to fit certain stylistic benchmarks. AND it was like 90000% of your grade (well, maybe math wasn’t my strong-suit, but I digress). So every Sunday morning, I would watch The Golden Girls in syndication as I worked on my poetry notebook. I watched a crap ton of The Golden Girls. It elevated my sense of humor to levels I never thought previously possible and thus I now sit here and proselytize to you.
But I understand that many of you are adults (UGH!) with jobs (YUCK!) who can’t watch television all morning long while filling a binder with retyped Emily Dickinson on the pretty printer paper from Office Depot (CRYING SADFACE EMOJI) and also maybe haven’t already seen every episode of The Golden Girls (EDVARD MUNCH’S THE SCREAM EMOJI). Don’t worry. I’m here to help.
7 Seasons of a show can be a little daunting, even for the most seasoned of TV junkies. As you make your way out on the lanai this Galentine’s Day, you may want to visit these 12 episodes of The Golden Girls first:
“The Way We Met” – This episode from the end of the first season’s run has ALL of the backstory on how the girls met and became roommates. It is a great place to start if you want to learn a little about each character and figure out how the heck they all wound up together.
“Dorothy’s Prized Pupil” – Okay, okay I may have MOSTLY put this on the list because it features a pre-Saved by the Bell, Mario Lopez. But if you care at all about modern political issues like immigration, then it’s a good look at how things were in the 80’s and how things have changed (or not) since. Also, this episode was written by Christopher Lloyd (who also writes for Modern Family and wrote for Frasier and Wings).
“Old Friends” – This is the infamous Jenny Lewis episode (in which she holds Rose’s teddy bear hostage). It’s also a very bittersweet episode about Sophia making a new friend, who she soon realizes has Alzheimer’s.
“Letter to Gorbachev” – Rose has written a moving letter to Gorbachev, but he mistakenly thinks it’s from a little girl.We see the Sunshine Cadets again in this episode. (But not Jenny Lewis. My guess is she was removed from the group after the bear-napping incident.)
“Grab that Dough” – I think this episode would get 
Lucille Ball’s seal of approval. It’s zany. It’s a little slapstick. It’s a comedy of errors. The girls travel to LA to be game show contestants and everything, literally, everything, goes wrong.
“The Days and Nights of Sophia Petrillo” – I love this episode because it talks about society’s misconceptions of older adults. The three younger women all sit around in the house talking about how Sophia isn’t active enough. Meanwhile, she’s roaming around Miami having a full day.
“Sick and Tired: Pts 1 & 2” – This episode’s writer has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and she used this episode to very clearly paint a picture of how frustrated and vulnerable patients feel when they are dismissed by healthcare providers who do not take their concerns seriously. It’s a pretty heavy A-plot, so thankfully the B-plot is downright hilarious. I mean SERIOUSLY one of the funniest things I have ever seen on television. Blanche decides to write a romance novel and stays up all night to the point of delirium.
“Clinton Avenue Memoirs” – This is a lovely flashback episode in which we get to see a young Dorothy and Sophia in their New York days. Sophia is becoming more forgetful in her older age, so she travels back to New York to revisit her past, particularly her memories of her deceased husband, Sal. If you’re not into Dorothy and Sophia as characters, then this might not be the best episode for you as there’s definitely not much of Rose and Blanche in this one.
“Henny Penny – Straight, No Chaser” – This one is just plain silly. The plot is pretty weak (a cast of children get the measles, so the girls perform this kids play in their place), but it’s really just an excuse to see veteran Broadway actresses sing and dance in chicken suits. I’ve been trying for years to find a way to get this episode on this blog.
“The Case of The Libertine Bell” – I already sort of covered this episode in a “Friday Face-off” a while back, but it really deserves a watch. Also, Wikipedia tells me that this episode is meant to be a parody of Murder, She Wrote, so that makes it even more fun.
“The Monkey Show” – Am I the only one who loves a good telethon episode? I don’t know what it is, but I just adore them. I may even do a series on telethon episodes one day, but I digress. So yes, this one is about a telethon. It’s also an hour-long episode, so you get double the fun! But it isn’t just a telethon, oh no, there’s also a hurricane on the way. THE STAKES ARE HIGH, PEOPLE! Also, the name of this episode comes from Dorothy’s ex-husband’s pet comfort monkey (essentially, a plush traffic cone with a face).
“One Flew Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest” – This is the finale ( 😦 ). Dorothy leaves the girls (and Stan, finally) behind and marries Leslie Neilson. As endings go, this one is pretty solid. Too bad Sophia, Blanche, and Rose went on to do a lame spin-off (The Golden Palace). I don’t recommend it to even the most die-hard fans, unless maybe you’re a die hard Cheech Marin fan.
Did I leave out any of your favorite episodes? Let me know in the comments!
So here’s the thing. I had originally planned on this post being longer, but then my neighbor’s smoke detector went off for 45 minutes. We have faulty smoke alarms in this building (uhhh not reassuring at all now that I’m typing that out…) and there have been many false alarms. So I was banging on his door and then running around the building, calling the emergency after hours number, going outside and across the street to see if the light was on in his apartment, as one does, etc, etc. I’m sure I look like a creep on the security footage because then I was feeling his door and doorknob and sniffing the air for smoke, looking at the hallway to see if it looked cloudy, saying curse words like F*** WHY DO WE NOT HAVE A SUPER?? By this time, I was pretty confident that there wasn’t a fire (but don’t follow my example because if any of you die while following my instructions, I will never forgive myself) and then I convinced myself that my neighbor must have died while cooking and now his dinner was burning in the pan.
Anyway, I also now cannot find my playbill, so I’ll keep this actual review brief. 
Stan shows up with at the girls’ house and tries to get them to invest in a new business plan for manufacturing fake vomit. They slam the door in his face, of course.
Anyway, all of the girls decide to help out a Rose’s church, feeding the homeless. They’re really just looking to unload some fruitcake, but I guess it’s good to get volunteers any way you can. But when they get there they find out that Stan is homeless. He put every last penny into a novelty item of Santa wearing sunglasses and driving a fire engine. But the supplier only delivered the Santas on Christmas Eve. Oh and also Stan’s wife has thrown him out of the house.
But Dorothy gives Stan a pep talk on how he once saved Christmas for their kids when they had no money. He convinced them that Christmas was actually December 26th and stole a tree from someone’s trash. He decorated it and they all had a nice holiday. I guess you can kind of see why Dorothy once loved this guy.
First up, for this week’s matchup is Saved By The Bell: Mystery Weekend. As you know, all the kids from the cool clique in high school liked to spend their free time at bed & breakfasts solving mysteries with middle-aged retirees. So things start off with the teens chilling with a lot of creepy adults in a “haunted mansion.”
Meanwhile, Lisa, who was packing while Zack retrieved the vouchers, has disappeared from a locked room. This leads Zack, Screech, and Slater to discover a secret passage leading from the bedroom to the host’s office (sketch). This causes Zack to somehow figure out that Lisa was in on the whole thing, the game never stopped, and the host is actually dressed as a woman and the murderer/thief/it doesn’t entirely make sense to me.
Todd Susman plays the private detective who was supposed to protect an 88 year-old man from being shot. He failed and the 88 year old guy’s twenty-something wife is also “dead.” Todd Susman finds an exotic dagger near the woman’s body and a gun in the old man’s spinster daughter’s purse (you follow?). He then tells the group of guests that they should be able to solve the murders just from this information.
Basically, there’s a rival with Blanche named “Posey McGlenn” They’re both trying to sleep with their boss and get a promotion. Dorothy determines that Ms. McGlenn must have killed Blanche’s male friend because she was jealous (and new exactly where Blanche had left her dress whilst showering pre-romantic rendezvous). Then Posey almost shoots Dorothy, but the cops intervene in time. And surprise, surprise, the dead guy walks down the stairs because it was all part of the game.
Hi Very Special Readers! Every now and then I like to do a little PSA. I don’t know how many of you listen to podcasts. I’m a dabbler myself, but I heard about this one today and I feel like it’s worth reporting to all of you pop-culture nostalgists.
You know what I find most bizarre about this episode? Oh hold on, maybe you need to know a little about the plot first. Okay, so Rose is learning to paint but she doesn’t know what a horse looks like (from memory). So she bugs Dorothy to take her to the racetrack. Dorothy resists and then finally obliges..jpg/revision/latest?cb=20101208103602)
g season. Ever since, she’s been taking narcotics. That’s why she’s so un-phased and stupid all the time. Rose is always on drugs. When Sophia accidentally knocks the pill bottle into the sink all of the pills go down the drain, and Rose cannot get a new prescription for two days. Things come to a head when she lashes out at a pizzeria owner who has come to the house to film a commercial starring Sophia.
The Very Special Blog 