Colucci - Golden Girls Forever

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GOLDEN GIRLS FOREVER. Copyright 2016 by Jim Colucci. Illustrations in Chapter 4 of Rose Nylund, Blanche Elizabeth Devereaux, Dorothy Zbornak, and Sophia Petrillo copyright 2016 by Headcase Design. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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ISBN 978-0-06-242290-3

EPub Edition April 2016 ISBN 9780062422927

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948758

First Printing, 2016

To

BEA ARTHUR,

RUE McCLANAHAN, BETTY WHITE ,

and ESTELLE GETTY

Thank You for Being

a Friend

Before the Girls were Golden, and after Miami was Nice, one of the alternate titles briefly considered was Ladies Day.

Photo courtesy of LEX PASSARIS.

Brandon always came up with these wacky ideas, and some of them were genius and some were terrible. Thats the sort of thing that happens with creative people who mine their inner child. You either get Mr. Smith, about the talking orangutan, or you get The Golden Girls.

GARTH ANCIER,

former head of current comedy at NBC

PICTURE IT: AUGUST 24, 1984. Two actresses of a certain age, each currently appearing on a hit NBC show, step out onstage at the networks Burbank headquarters. As presenters at the networks fall preview special, they trade scripted patter from a teleprompter, and in the process, do more than a little ogling of a male lead in one of the peacock networks more promising new dramas. The object of their affection? None other than Mr. Don Johnson, then about to debut in the fashion- and decade-defining hit Miami Vice. And the gawking gals, whose performance that night would inspire NBC president Brandon Tartikoff to commission a sitcom about the active lives and loves of the over-sixty set? They are, of course... Selma Diamond and Doris Roberts.

What, you were expecting Bea Arthur or Betty White?

The tale of how one of the most beloved comedies of all time made its way to the small screen is not a straightforward one, nor is it very likely.

IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY TV land, we may have more channels to choose from, but some things havent really changed since 1985; then, as now, broadcast networks like NBC aimed their programming squarely at the advertiser-coveted 18-49 age demographic. So that night at the NBC presentation, when Selma Diamond, who was then appearing on the networks Thursday night sitcom Night Court, stopped eyeballing Don Johnson long enough to excitedly tell Remington Steeles Doris Roberts that theres this wonderful new show, all about retirees in Floridaits called Miami Nice, it was obviously a joke. Or was it?

In his 1992 memoir, The Last Great Ride, the late former NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff remembers spending a rainy afternoon channel surfing with his seven-year-old niece until they agreed on the 1953 Betty GrableLauren BacallMarilyn Monroe movie How to Marry a Millionaire. Tartikoff was struck by the idea: how about a frothy comedy about a group of women sharing an apartment together, waiting to meet Mister Right? There was just one problem: other people hated the idea, especially women. When he tried to recruit female writers to work on the project, they were offended at the idea of presenting the young, independent 1980s woman as being incomplete without a man. But the idea stuck in the back of Tartikoffs mind, and later, while visiting his elderly aunt in Florida and observing her crotchety interplay with her neighbor, he had another inspiration: make it How to Marry a Millionaire for Women over Fifty.

Brandon may not have shared those thoughts with us all, so Im not sure how the How to Marry a Millionaire stuff ended up actually being connected to the development of The Golden Girls, explains Warren Littlefield, who was then the networks Vice President of Comedy Programs. But Littlefield does know that at what may have been the same time, the Miami Nice gag was gathering steam. It had been the highlight of laughter in a long, boring shoot night, he remembers. That fall preview special had all these hot young stars from other shows, but here were these two middle-aged actresses who stood up in the spotlight and bam! They were sharp, they were hitting it, and they made their segment pop. A week later at Los Angeless Century Plaza Hotel for the networks off-site retreat, Littlefield, Tartikoff, and other executives tossed around ideas to develop into series for the 198586 season. As they recalled Diamond and Robertss phenomenal performance, suddenly Miami Nice, the shtick about the ridiculousness of a retirees in Florida sitcom, didnt seem so ridiculous anymore.

From that meeting, Littlefield resolved to seriously develop Miami Nice as a sitcom for the following season. The timing was right to be daring. Only one season after turning around its comedy fortunes with the 1984 debut of The Cosby Show, NBC had nowhere to go but up. And having succeeded by airing Miami Viceeven though testing prior to the shows debut had predicted horrendous ratingsthe executives were ready to reach outside the 18-49 age group and defy convention one more time. We felt like lightning had struck us with something, Warren explains. We would look at those little charts in USA Today, and there would be some factoid like women over fifty have a one in eleven billion chance of remarrying. It was always some sad statistic, and it reinforced what we were feeling about Miami Nice, that somehow, these women would be there for each other, and they would take a difficult reality and make a bright picture out of it.