For seven seasons, The
Golden Girls brought groundbreaking comedy to the small screen, and made
icons of its four leading ladies. Then
in 1992, three of the Girls packed up
the house on Miami’s Richmond Street, and moved to the beach – and to CBS.
 |
The Cast of Golden Palace (1992-93).
Back: Cheech Marin as chef Chuy Castillos;
Don Cheadle as desk clerk Roland Wilson;
Billy L. Sullivan as Oliver Webb;
Front: Rue McClanahan, Betty White, Estelle Getty |
With schoolteacher Dorothy Zbornak now married and living in
Atlanta – after actress Bea Arthur had opted out of The Golden Girls, thus ending the series – her roommates Blanche
and Rose moved to Golden Palace,
making the odd, life-changing decision to invest their savings in the show’s
titular hotel. Stranger still, Dorothy
had even left her by now nearly nonagenarian mother Sophia behind; soon, after
some financial miscalculations, the three women found themselves putting in
backbreaking hours of cooking and cleaning as the Art Deco District’s most
unlikely hoteliers.
Producer Tony Thomas remembers the decision to take the
three remaining Girls in such a new
direction. “You don’t replace Bea – it
would have been ridiculous to have someone try,” he explains. Thomas says that he and fellow producers, Golden Girls creator Susan Harris and
her husband Paul Witt, “have always liked the idea of doing a show about life
in a hotel. There’s something appealing
about a core cast in such a transient setting.”
“We wanted to show these woman as still vital and active,”
Witt adds. “So taking over a small hotel
would put them in contact on a regular basis with interesting people, and keep
them active as they learned to do something different. We couldn’t do ‘Golden Girls Redux’ or ‘Golden
Girls Continued.’ We had to make it
different and hopefully comfortable.”
The Old College Try
The cast of Golden
Palace boasted not only three sitcom heavyweights in Betty White, Rue
McClanahan and Estelle Getty, but also comedy legend Cheech Marin, and future House of Lies star Don Cheadle as the
hotel’s desk clerk, Roland Wilson. And
like the Girls before it, Palace also boasted some of today’s
hottest comedy writing talents among its staff.
But writer Mitchell Hurwitz, who would later create CBS’
sitcom The Ellen Show before finding
fame with Arrested Development, remembers
his colleagues’ unease with the Palace
premise from the start. “People really
related to The Golden Girls. The husband leaves, which was something a lot
of women had gone through in that generation,” he notes. But with Golden
Palace, “now we were asking the audience to relate to having to run and
manage a hotel, and clean the rooms yourself.
It was an interesting premise, which created a lot of opportunities for
comedy, but it wasn’t what people came to The
Golden Girls for.”
In the
2006 interview I conducted, via the Archive of American Television, with McClanahan, who died in 2010, she also remembered the difficulties in transferring her character Blanche to the new
seaside setting. “We gave it the good
old college try, but [
Golden Palace]
wasn’t the right thing to do. It took
the center out of the characters as they had been established – particularly
Blanche. She had to become a
businesswoman, and run a hotel. How did
she learn how to do that? Where did that
come from? It required more out of the
Blanche character than ever before, and I found it very hard to find the way to
play it.” Presenting the
Girls without their popular fourth
friend Dorothy, McClanahan recalled, “really was like walking without one
shoe.”
AfterG*I*R*L*S
Premiering on September 18, 1992 as part of CBS’ new
two-hour comedy block, Golden Palace
won its 8 PM time slot for its first few weeks.
But soon, the entire night began to sink in the ratings. For every rare case like Frasier, which would premiere the next fall and would last eleven
seasons, there is an AfterM*A*S*H, or
a Joey. And Golden
Palace would soon prove to belong to the latter category of sequel series.
“Golden Palace was
ill-conceived from the start,” says another former writer, Marc Cherry, who
went on to create CBS’ sitcoms The Five
Mrs. Buchanans and Some of My Best
Friends before his iconic Desperate
Housewives (and now, Lifetime's eagerly anticipated new series Devious Maids.) “Old ladies just don’t
go around buying hotels.”
Still, Cherry says, “Golden
Palace is no [tacky ‘80s syndicated sitcom] Small Wonder. There are
moments of the show that are actually quite good.” One particularly touching episode, he agrees,
featured Ned Beatty as Blanche’s heretofore unmentioned, mentally challenged
brother. In another, lifelong animal
activist Betty White was able to highlight the sad plight of greyhounds
discarded by Florida racetracks. In a
two-part episode, Arthur’s Dorothy returned to visit her old friends in their
new setting, bringing with her an hour’s worth of that old Golden magic. And throughout
its 24-episode run, Golden Palace
sported cameos from the biggest stars of yesteryear, like George Burns, Eddie
Albert, Tim Conway and Harvey Korman, and gave early breaks not just to
Cheadle, but other future comedy stars like Jack Black, Margaret Cho and Bill
Engvall.
“With a little more time, I think we could have gotten [Golden Palace] to be very good – but we
didn’t get there,” Witt remembers. In the
spring of 1993, Palace was cancelled
after its freshman season, along with
the entire Friday comedy block.
Although Cherry says that he worried at the time that the
sub-par Golden Palace would end up
tarnishing the memory of its parent series, many fans have come to see the show
as the Girls’ de facto eighth
season. Unlike Girls, Palace is not
available on DVD – but it caused a sensation in the mid 2000’s when Lifetime briefly tacked its episodes onto the end of its regular Golden Girls run.
Marin, who went on to star in CBS’ shows Nash Bridges and Rob, remembers an additional Palace
legacy. Conscious of Miami as a rich
ethnic and racial melting pot, the
show’s producers had hired the Mexican-American actor to play the hotel’s Cuban
chef Chuy Castillos; Marin says he used to refer to himself and Cheadle,
surrounded by older white ladies, as “the Afro-Cuban section of the Lawrence
Welk band.”
Marin says his greatest memory of Golden Palace was working with co-star Getty – but not in any
moment that showed up on screen. “She
taught me to make a great matzoh ball, and boy, it just makes them nice and
fluffy,” the 66-year-old actor remembers.
“I make great matzoh ball soup to this day, for which I’m eternally
grateful – as are my children.”
