Which The Golden Girls Character Are You?

Learn More About The Golden Girls

In 1985, NBC put four women over fifty at the center of a primetime sitcom and watched it become one of the biggest shows on television. The Golden Girls, created by Susan Harris, ran seven seasons and 180 episodes, won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series twice, and made all four of its leads Emmy winners, a feat matched by almost nothing else in the medium. It did this at a moment when the industry consensus was that audiences did not want to watch older women at all, let alone older women talking frankly about sex, money, aging parents and death.

The premise was elegantly simple. Dorothy Zbornak, a substitute teacher divorced after thirty-eight years, shares a Miami house with Blanche Devereaux, a Southern widow with an extremely active social calendar, and Rose Nylund, a grief counselor from the fictional Minnesota town of St. Olaf. Then Dorothy mother Sophia turns up after her retirement home burns down, and the household is complete. Four women, one kitchen table, and a cheesecake that gets destroyed roughly once an episode.

What made it durable was the casting. Bea Arthur brought a decade of stage authority and the driest delivery on television to Dorothy, a woman whose intelligence had never once been rewarded. Betty White, deliberately cast against her established man-hungry persona, played Rose as sincerely as possible, which is why the St. Olaf stories land instead of grating. Rue McClanahan took the role White might have had and turned Blanche into something more interesting than a punchline: a woman genuinely, unembarrassedly in charge of her own appetite. And Estelle Getty, who was actually younger than both Arthur and White, spent seven years in old-age makeup delivering the meanest lines on network television.

The writing went places sitcoms of the era mostly avoided. Episodes dealt with HIV and AIDS at the height of the crisis, with same-sex partnership, homelessness, assisted living, chronic illness, immigration and elder poverty, and they did it inside a conventional multi-camera format without ever turning preachy. The show got away with it because the jokes stayed sharp and because the friendship at the center was completely believable.

Its afterlife has been extraordinary. The Golden Girls has never really left syndication, and streaming introduced it to viewers born long after it ended. It has an enormous and devoted LGBTQ+ following, built over decades on the show open-heartedness and on Sophia and Blanche willingness to say the unsayable. There have been Golden Girls themed cafes, cruises, puppet parodies off-Broadway, an endless supply of merchandise, and a level of quotability that keeps the show circulating on social media constantly.

The fifth result in this quiz, Stan Zbornak, deserves a word. Herb Edelman recurring turn as Dorothy hapless ex-husband gave the series its most reliable comic villain and, occasionally, something sadder: a man who cannot stop returning to a life he threw away. He is the reminder that the show was never really about romance. It was about the friendships you build after the plans fall through.

For more of the great ensemble sitcoms, try Cheers, Full House, or Modern Family. But first, settle it: are you the sharp one, the sweet one, the bold one, the brutal one, or Stan? Take the quiz.