Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Yesterday, Hulu began streaming all seven seasons of The Golden Girls, the cherished sitcom surrounding four female roommates/best friends of a certain age who crack wise while sunning themselves on their lanai and eating cheesecake. Created by Susan Harris, the 11-time Emmy-winning series starring Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty, Rue McClanahan, and Betty White premiered on NBC following The Facts of Life in September 1985. Upon conclusion of its 180-episode run, Harris next created a pair of spinoffs: for seven seasons on NBC, Empty Nest followed the happenings of Dr. Harry Weston (Richard Mulligan), a widowed Miami pediatrician who resided next to The Golden Girls with his two adult daughters; Meanwhile, Getty, McClanahan, and White reprised their roles for The Golden Palace, a 24-episode CBS foray into the trio’s hotel ownership.
The Golden Girls employed a large, rotating company with dozens of writers and producers. The best-known behind-the-scenes alums are Arrested Development creator Mitchell Hurwitz (who produced 22 episodes, then the entirety of The Golden Palace) and Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry (who wrote 11 episodes, plus a quartet for the spinoff). If IMDB is any indication, life on The Golden Girls set was fun indeed — show veterans frequently collaborated on new projects, seemingly to recapture the magic. Decider revisits a few of those programs that made it to air without quite managing to pervade the pop culture lexicon.
The Fanelli Boys (1990 to 1991)
Four Golden Girls writer-producers (Barry Fanaro, Terry Grossman, Mort Nathan, and Kathy Speer) developed The Fanelli Boys, an NBC sitcom with a narrative easily traced back to its predecessor and Empty Nest. Ann Guilbert (then remembered as the Van Dyke’s neighbor, Millie Helper, on The Dick Van Dyke Show; she later achieved recognition as Fran Drescher’s grandmother, Yetta, on The Nanny) starred as Theresa Fanelli, a recently-widowed mother living with her four grown sons. Originally, per Vincent Terrace’s Encyclopedia of Television Shows, 1925 through 2010, Theresa planned to sell her family’s Brooklyn funeral home and retire to Florida (on The Golden Girls, Dorothy Zbornak (nee Petrillo) and her mother, Sophia — a widowed Sicilian immigrant — moved from Brooklyn to Miami following Dorothy’s divorce). However, her oldest son, undertaker Anthony (Ned Eisenberg), discovers that the business is $25,000 in debt. Also at life’s crossroads are his siblings — Dominic (The Sopranos‘s Joe Pantoliano), a downtrodden hustler evading loan sharks; Frankie (future Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Wet Hot American Summer star Christopher Meloni), a newly un-engaged bartender who People described as a “doltish womanizer,” and Ronnie (Andy Hirsch), a cougar-hunting college dropout.
Summoned back under their mother’s roof, they all patronize a neighborhood institution called the Knights of Sicily and seek counsel from a fortune teller, Philomena (Vera Lockwood), and their Uncle Angelo (Richard Libertini), a Catholic priest with a television show (Sophia Petrillo’s brother, Angelo, aspired to be a priest). According to Stephen Tropiano’s 2002 book, The Primetime Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV, in one episode, Dominic reels when he learns that his childhood friend, the Lothario-seeming Tommy Esposito (Chazz Palmintieri, an Oscar nominee for Bullets Over Broadway), is actually gay. Although the premiere garnered 14 million viewers, NBC cancelled the series after 19 episodes. In the two-part finale, Theresa marries a restaurant owner (William Windom), and they celebrate with a trip to Mexico. The Los Angeles Times described The Fanelli Boys as “a likable little NBC series about noisy Italian-Americans whose combative talk around the family dinner table and elsewhere — with their hands, naturally — gives prime time a rare ethnic comedy whose stereotypes are far less insulting than endearing.” People gave the show a B+.
The Mommies (later known simply as Mommies, 1993 to 1995)
Post-Fanelli Boys, Grossman, and Speers reunited again for The Mommies, a sitcom based on the lives of its two leads (Caryl Kristensen and Marilyn Kentz), married stay-at-home moms who told The Los Angeles Times that they met as neighbors in Petaluma, California. In the pilot episode (above), we meet Marilyn Larson and her pregnant best friend, Caryl Kellogg, in a school parking lot. Each one is raising both a troublemaker and a wiseass. Onscreen, they are next door neighbors who rifle through each other’s cabinets and talk on the phone when they’re not in the same room. Encyclopedia of Television Shows reports that the two families also share a dog, Cosmo; on the subject of sex, Caryl says men are “such happy puppies when they get it.” Motherhood has turned out to be less-engrossing than what’s advertised in parenting books, and our protagonists trade rueful gibes about the Sisyphean realities (and discuss vasectomies over a laundry basket full of socks). When Marilyn’s husband (David Dukes) nudges her towards dirty talk, her mind only wanders as far as a trip to Target.
Former Entertainment Weekly television critic Ken Tucker was not a fan, awarding the show an F and beginning his review with the line, “There is something deeply satisfying about The Mommies — the conviction that you have stumbled upon the most hateful sitcom of the new season.” Variety was less harsh in an article that teased McClanahan’s upcoming guest role as Marilyn’s mother-in-law: “Though it has its moments, this is not a series that’s destined for any Hall of Fame.” Eventual Girls Emmy-winner Peter Scolari had a supporting role in two of the last episodes, and Shiloh Strong—the older brother of Boy Meets World‘s Rider Strong—was with the cast for all 28 outings before NBC’s cancellation.
The 5 Mrs. Buchanans (1994 to 1995)
A decade before Cherry had a hit with Desperate Housewives, he and Golden Girls writer/producer/story editor Jamie Wooten created The 5 Mrs. Buchanans around on another four-woman ensemble (Judith Ivey, now a two-time Tony winner; Charlotte Ross, a future NYPD Blue detective; Harriet Sansom Harris, later a Tony winner and Desperate Housewives regular; and Beth Broderick, who went on to play Sabrina the Teenage Witch‘s Aunt Zelda). The heroines are each married a son of Emma Buchanan (Eileen Heckart, a Broadway veteran who won an Oscar for Butterflies Are Free), whom they despise; in a tongue-and-cheek choice, the fictional setting is Mercy, Indiana. Before her philandering husband took off, Emma wanted to become a doctor; instead, she became a very controlling woman concerned with the minutiae of her children’s lives. According to one onscreen quote from Ivey’s character (included in Encyclopedia of Television Shows), “The woman would qualify for sainthood if it were not for one little thing: she’s a bitch.” Respectively, her sons have married an antique shop owner from New York, a former nude model and stripper from Texas, a former Disneyland Cinderella from California, and a Republican heiress from Indiana (People claims she was inspired by former Vice President Dan Quayle’s wife, Marilyn).
The show was given an initial 13-episode order, and CBS added a five-episode pick-up following the premiere. Ultimately, only 17 episodes aired before cancellation, which ended the cast’s hopes that it would be moved from Saturdays to Mondays to follow Murphy Brown. People bestowed the series with a B and a favorable comparison to Designing Women: “The humor falls on the obvious side, but the show’s pacing is snappy and the characters are sharply delineated.”
Platypus Man (1995)
No, this show wasn’t about a man who morphes into a four-legged Austrialian mammal (we wish). For this venture, the male half of The Fanelli Boys creative foursome took their not-so-catchy title from Richard Jeni’s 1993 HBO stand-up special (see above). In it, he recounts eating popcorn in bed one night, watching a nature documentary and learning that a platypus is a solitary, confusing creature that “eats late at night and can’t even see it’s food.” Jeni played a version of himself on the UPN sitcom (Golden Girls writer-producers like Gail Parent and Robert Bruce wrote episodes), but instead of a comedian, he was a chef who hosted the TV series Cooking with the Platypus Man. Rounding out the cast on the series that The New York Times described as “will remind viewers of Home Improvement” and “go[ing] into pop-culture reference overload” were Jeni’s on-camera best friend and executive producer (Ron Orbach), his bartender brother (David Dundara) and sportswriter neighbor (Denise Miller).
In a C review, People claims that the plotlines often unfolded like this: “Every time he starts a recipe on the air, it reminds him of his most recent dating debacle, and we drift off into a lengthy flashback,” which—The Los Angeles Times asserted—resorted in “deadeningly formulaic scenarios.” Unenthused, People also tsked-tsked the “hit-or-miss humor that often strikes a desperate note, [with] an anemic supporting cast, gag-me gags and feeble plotting.” The show lasted 13 episodes. Jeni’s brief sitcom career will always be overshadowed by his suicide, in 2007, at age 49.
Brandy & Mr. Whiskers (2004 to 2006)
Russell Marcus wrote three Golden Girls scripts in the ’80s, produced 50 episodes of Married with Children in the ’90s, and created his own Disney Channel animated series in the aughts. Brandy & Mr. Whiskers begins aboard an airplane when Mr. Whiskers (prolific voice actor Charlie Adler) — a smelly rabbit that’s been sold for pennies to a Paraguayan zoo — escapes from a sack and raps on the bedazzled pink carrying case of Brandy (current Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco), an uppity dog from Florida that walks on her hind legs and wants nothing to do with Mr. Whiskers. Bound for a spa in Rio de Janeiro, Brandy instead finds herself accidentally ejected from the plane with her new companion, plunging on an inflatable life raft into the Amazon Rainforest, where they remained for all 39 episodes. The mismatched duo befriended lots of exotic creatures (including twin toucans played by Sherri Shepherd and a snake played by Thomas Lennon), and even gentrified their surroundings.
