Hacker Cinema
The Golden Girls
1985 · TV series · 24 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Susan Harris
Four Southern Florida seniors share a house, their dreams, and a whole lot of cheesecake. Bright, promiscuous, clueless and hilarious, these lovely, mismatched ladies form the perfect circle of friends.
6 positive1 negative12 neutralfrom 19 commenters
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21 comments on Hacker News
It was the writers of TV comedy series SCTV (Second City TV) that noted how they had used to write and film the show sometimes up to 6 months in advance of it being screened. This forced them to avoid any recent events or specific political jokes. As such a lot of it aged much better than their contemporaries where the jokes applied to the current news cycle.
The one time I find funny was on the show 'The Golden Girls' where they had Bob Hope do about 2 minutes of his stand up and it was all jokes about Ronald Reagan and the administration of the time. It aged terribly.
Movies and the technology they use needs to have the eye of an artist not just an eye of how to use it. I mean the visual effects can be technically low level but when used in the right context still work exceptionally well. The Abyss being the best example of this, CGI is only used on a creature that is completely alien and doesn't conform to anything real world and that is why it works. But I could render it faster on my watch than the systems they built it on.
> There is a crazy amount of land in the world, but either it's too expensive or you're not allowed to build over it, or a combination of both.
This is true, to a degree. There is another factor and thats WHAT kind of housing we build.
> ruling class + landlords are not interested that housing be an affordable thing
Off the mark, the real people pinning housing prices where they are, are home owners. Home ownership is the leading predictor of voting, and issues that maintain or raise current home prices will drive that up. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/if-you-lived-here-you-might-be-voter-now
Furthermore home ownership is a functionally unmovable number: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N (that fed data is interesting and says a lot, capturing the 2008 financial crisis, bad lending hardly moved the needle in real terms).
> controlling their access to housing?
The reality is that this is a social problem.
Boomers are living longer (higher quality of life) and alone. They either took their parents in (cohabitation) or put them in homes. I know plenty of elderly people who are living in large houses, by themselves, who had their parents, at that same age living with them. You're not going to see a bunch of retirees moving in together to save on bills - The TV show "Golden Girls" would not make sense today.
On that note, cohabitation among younger generations is down. Fewer people have roommates, and lots of them "want to live alone" - sharing a house with 4 friends is much cheaper than living in a studio or one bedroom. And there are whole categories of housing, like boarding houses, that have disappeared. Again this is a cultural problem, look at the TV show "Bosom Buddies" - this is something that would be lost on a modern audience for so many reasons.
Part of the cohabitation issue is "renters rights" have gone way too far. There are plenty of people with space, who will not cohabitate because the risk, cost and pain of a renter turning into a squatter is WAY too high. The rules to protect good renters from bad landlords have only served to push out good landlords because of bad tenants.
> If someday economic activity gets automated enough... This will never happen. If you dont think were going to find new things to keep busy and if you dont think were going to find new ways to compete for "dominance" I have news for you.
The one I hate so much is fake ai-made movie trailers. I just got fooled by a fake AI-generated for a new Tropic Thunder. There's another one where they have ai-made Harrison Ford playing the old man from Up, and one of the girls from FRIENDs playing the Golden Girls. It's not art it's deceptive. It's so aggravating.
For what it's worth, I don't think the author quite has it right other.
The philippic leads with a clip of Sophia Petrillo, from the TV show Golden Girls. According to the show, she was born in 1905 or 1905. The actor who portrayed her, Estelle Getty, was born in 1923. Either date makes her a member of the so-called Greatest Generation, after which is the Silent Generation, and only then reaching the Baby Boomers.
> Wouldn’t measuring dynamics of home ownership using a unit “households” cause all sorts of problems?
I had the same impression at first as well. But a household is a household is a household. That massive increase in people living alone follows the same 60/40 split on ownership that more "traditional" married couples would.
The affordability of housing has changed since the 60's, 70's and 80's. And it's what your intuition is picking up on. And it does relate to what is a household, but not because it's a poor measure but because the housing stock we have no longer matches how we use housing.
If you go back to 1985, the boomers were in their prime years and housing was much more affordable than today. The greatest generation was dying off, and in their golden years they lived together (The literal plot of golden girls), in homes or moved in with kids.
The boomers are NOT doing that. They are occupying multi bedroom housing stock, as couples or alone. This has created much of their wealth and lots of price pressure on younger generations. The millennials will tell you "housing was worse for them" and it was: the two large cohorts competing for the limited supply, and one was deeply entrenched already.
Do note that boomers aren't the only ones "living alone more" its a fairly equal distribution but they have the first mover advantage, historic pricing advantage, and tend to be the ones occupying multi bedroom housing alone creating the utilization pressure.
And the Golden Girls type living situations are unviable today for legal reasons. Overly broad tenants rights have killed the concept of co-habitation (roomates/housemates) turning 2,3, and 4 bedroom houses into single family homes, and zoning + tenants rights have finished off the boarding house (there might be hand full left in the US, this was the plot of another 80's tv series).
Telling The boomers to move in with the millennials is going to be massively unpopular with both groups. Telling renters that "you get less rights" is going to be politically impossible (even if it is only for 'housemates' situations). Death or a major change to Americans political will are the only fixes that we are going to see.
Your son did not adopt toxic right wing ideology because of DEI. Your son adopted toxic right wing ideology because he grew up in a society that exudes it at every step, and because right wing ideology is the cheetos of ideology. It's easy and
The entire young male community right now has circled the wagons around "woke" hatred, which is really funny, because they should see the media I grew up with! Imagine someone saying catching AIDS isn't a personal failing in the 80s! Yet the Golden Girls is considered top quality entertainment. But no, suddenly we have to pretend that the same people who insisted Rock N Roll was hypnotizing our children are suddenly correct that making a movie about a trans person will hypnotize our children into being trans?
The mountains of kids insisting that what "gamers" want is hypersexualized boobs with eyes is awful. They don't know history either, like when Mass Effect 2 was lampooned for giving it's "genetically perfect" female character extremely visible camel toe, and placing a cinematic camera up her butt crack.
Samus Aran is from 1986. And fucking Japan. GI Jane got so much hatred in the 90s. Why are we still doing this?
>I want my old son back
Then why don't you be the parent? Why don't you help your son understand the parts of right wing propaganda that are blatantly false? Why don't you help your son understand what women experience? Why don't you help him see the rhetorical trickery and lies of people like the Fresh and Fit podcast? Why don't you help him understand how to properly research controversial topics like that? Or help him understand how rhetoric in the News might not be an accurate narrative? Or have you ever talked to him about Gell-Mann amnesia?
I want my brother back from 30 years of indoctrination about how the reason he struggles is because of black people going to college, instead of him slacking off and not caring about school. When a Mainer who dropped out of community college flies the fucking Confederate battle flag in 2009, you don't get to blame DEI. I want him back from a century of indoctrination that kids would stop being shot at school if only it was easier to buy a rifle, or that my 65 year old mom who has no interest in being a cop should be made to carry a firearm to shoot one of her students.
Why is it always the democrat's fault for what republicans do?
Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Germany, I've been brainwashed by US movies and sitcoms, 90% of the things I've watched was from the US - Magnum P.I, Simon & Simon, The Fall Guy, Kojak, A-Team, Golden Girls, Mary Taylor Moore, Lou Grant, MacGyver, Knight Rider, Night Court, Family Ties, Miami Vice, The Wonder Years, Facts of Life, Love Boat, and on and on and on.
I know the US better than many parts of Germany.
My wife will run in from the other room to skip “Sleepytime” because she knows she’ll be bawling by the end of it if she even thinks about it. Does me the favor because I will be too.
My endorsement of the show is that it feels like one of the great sitcoms like Cheers or Frasier, Golden Girls or Roseanne. The stories are never pandering or simple. You never quite know where they’re going to go with a plot line so when it lands, you’re often delightfully surprised or floored. Most kids shows seem like a low effort afterthought full of contrived vapid nonsense. As far as I’m concerned my kids can watch as much Bluey as they like and I’ll buy the shit out of their merch if it signals to other networks to get off their asses.
Forgot to mention the animation in the show is absolutely some of the best I’ve ever seen in a cartoon. I really appreciate the way the show models real physics as things would be in the real world. One of my biggest pet peeves of kids shows is when they show something that is physically impossible (not for comedic purpose, just lazy storytelling). It’s basically just thumbing its nose at kids’ intelligence.
Do you have actual evidence for that?
Because sure, if you've got Property Brothers on in the background while you do other stuff, that makes sense. You can go in and out.
But if you're watching Squid Game, or The Last of Us, or Yellowjackets, or even Wednesday -- you'd better be paying attention to every frame. Modern dramatic TV demands your full attention in a way that The Golden Girls didn't.
The idea that younger generations are binge-watching Yellowjackets while browsing TikTok doesn't make any sense.
You don’t have to go very far back for this hypothesis to fail. Consider that on the classic American show the Golden Girls, a sitcom of seniors, the youngest of them was 53 (played by a 51 year old actress.)
We simply dress and act differently in our older age these days.
I know that at least Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Golden Girls accepted freelance scripts. You can sometimes find the submission guidelines for Star Trek: The Next Generation on fan sites. You can also tell if this is the case for a show by looking at the writers. If there are lots of writers who only wrote one or two episodes, the show probably took submissions.
All the old books about television script writing I've read are about submitting in this way, but by the time I was actually considering it episodic television was rapidly dying out.
I think I’ve seen this kind of farce happen often enough in sitcoms. Odd Couple “My Strife In Court”, Seinfeld “The Parking Garage”, The Golden Girls “Ladies of the Evening”. People are always getting arrested in sitcoms for dumb reasons.
This sounds a little crazy. AIDS was definitely discussed in TV in the 80s. First of all on the news all the time, but in prime time dramas and sitcom as well. CNN documents several examples.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/01/entertainment/80s-hollywood-aids-crisis
St Elsewhere might have been the first in 1983. Golden Girls, Trapper John MD. There was plenty of hesitancy to deal with a difficult subject, and the gay element compounded the difficulty (openly gay characters were not common). But to suggest it was at the direction of the Federal Govt is totally absurd. Reagan was as disliked and mocked almost as much as Trump was.
Tracy Ulman is the closest I can think of non-animated characters doing music parodies on a regular basis. But she usually made gaffe rock videos, which is related, but not what you're asking about.
Golden Girls did a few musical numbers, but that was a really long time ago. I can't think of any modern-day sitcom that could pull off musical parodies without coming across as being very strange. Yet it totally works for animations somehow.
> How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?
The issue you're failing to separate out is that you're talking about entertainment with television. Websites are largely not comparable in entertainment value, and most are not entertaining at all. People will pay a lot for entertainment. That's why blogs are worth $... today and Netflix is worth $226 billion. If people would pay so much for eg blogs (or, again, any other comparable content), there'd be a $100 billion company extracting that monthly payment for producing volumes of written content on websites. Some blog network would have actually succeeded and become a global content juggernaut.
Most of the content online is not of high quality and people will not pay for it, or they'll pay so little for it as to be a sad joke.
Which website compares to the joy and value people extracted from Friends, Seinfeld, MASH, Fresh Prince, I Love Lucy, and dozens of other prominent TV shows from the past ~50 years. Much less the even higher production shows like Sopranos or Game of Thrones. There may be a select few and they're billion dollar services like Reddit with huge volumes of low value content. Do millions of people still talk lovingly about some websites from 2006 like they do decades later about I Love Lucy? Hell no they don't, only a tiny niche group of people does that.
People go back and watch movies over and over again for decades. They listen to the same songs/bands/albums regularly for decades.
Does the average person go back and dig up long dead websites and go through them start to finish on Archive.org, like they do old TV shows they enjoyed (Quantum Leap, ALF, Golden Girls, whatever). Hell no they don't, again, only a very very tiny group of people would do such a thing.
Most online text content is not very entertaining, even in the best case scenarios, that's the difference between the concepts.
Is there lots of funny, amusing, entertaining text content on eg Reddit? You bet. And people will pay pennies for it - if at all - because it's of low value compared to high quality, higher production value entertainment. They'll pay what it's worth, a pittance.
My SO and me are regularly (at least once per year) watch "The Golden Girls" (or better she watches, while I fall asleep too soon). I now - despite sleeping through a lot of episodes have watched the series many times and I still love to visit old friends.
I would have wished for her to reach her 100st birthday - and for me to not have this year end with another passing away after 3 members of the family already gone.
Stay well out there and let's hope for a better 2022.
There was more sexual tension in an episode of the Golden Girls than most movies today.
I knew those already from being flooded for 40+ years with Hollywood films (all of them) and sitcoms, I know Cosby, Malcolm in the Middle, Beverly Hills 90210, Miami Vice, the Fall Guy, Seinfeld, Friends, Lou Grant, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Diff'rent Strokes, Cheers, Golden Girls, MAS*H (the best), Married... with Children, Three’s Company, King of Queens, Family Matters and on and on and on.
Basically I know the US better - or the image it projects - than my own country.
Funnily it was a huge letdown when I visited for the first time decades ago, as it felt just like a sitcom and there was nothing new really.
I agree with your sentiment. I agree with the general idea. My problem is that the people behind cancel culture are hypocrites. Fundamentalists and even society in general 30 years ago said homosexuality was morally abhorrent. They tried to cancel gays. People spoke up. They said that canceling someone was wrong. Through this the far left gained traction. Now they’ve turned around and established the old norms with a new boss.
The promise made in the late 90s was that the gays wanted a live and let live policy. What they did in their home life shouldn’t matter to anyone. If someone want to take issue with their life style, they could as long as the gays’ day to day rights were respected. The truce seems to be broken. There are those within the LGBTQ+ community that are seeking retribution. They are seeking to establish their own courts in the public discourse to revile those who took their forefathers to legal ones.
Ultimately this is going to end with the left eating itself. Their hypocrisy will run smooth after awhile. In the meantime there will be many hearts removed on the alter of their cause.
To the question below about canceling over intolerance, I see little benefit in that since the things which we are to tolerate keep moving as do those which we should abhor. Kevin Hart lost the opportunity to host an awards show because of some old jokes. Golden Girls had an episode removed because they wore mud masks. There was a fight at the BBC over a Faulty Towers episode with the N-word. Heck John Cleese is in self imposed exile because of the thought police in England.
To destroy a young man or woman’s future because of foolish indiscretions in their teens is unconscionable. That is the way of fostering the next generation of hate. We will continue to live in a truly racist world because of actions like this. To deny the children entry on these grounds is to say they have no value. They will take this with them into life. They will raise their children in the soil of animosity.
Firefly is great, albeit short.
I was forced to watch Buffy, but while the first season makes you cringe, it is pretty good. Not as stellar as people claim, but really good. I think Joss Whedans masterpiece wasn't Buffy, it was Toy Story. But do watch the musical episode "Once More, With Feeling"!
Babylon 5, of course, if you can tolerate the (even for the time) bad CGI.
I've just watched DS9 from beginning to end, something I had wanted to do for 15 years now. Hasn't aged well, and I hadn't seen it in English before. Avery Brooks' overpronunciation is painful, but it is the best Star Trek series by far.
Friends was something I've enjoyed as a teen, and later as an adult. It was a totally different experience as an adult. I think that's worth a lot, to have a depth that appeals differently to you in different stages of your life.
Modern Family was way better than expected.
ALF is a bit painful to watch nowadays, it also hasn't aged well.
Golden Girls are probably still great, The Cosby Show definitely is!
Boston Legal is fun, fun, fun! Hey, why shouldn't Nantucket be allowed to habe its own nuclear weapons? But do watch all the newer Star Trek series before BL, so you can appreciate the ST heavy cast.
Dallas! Oh my. Incredible how old Victoria Principal is today.
ER was great, but I haven't seen much of the last seasons. I also liked Chicago Hope, but it clearly lost.
The 2004 Battlestar Galactica. Probably the most modern TV series of its time, great themes and issues, pretty current, fantastic buildup to the big finale and then... disappointment.
Game of Thrones, if only for the shock value ;-)
And at last, the Tv series I've probably enjoyed most in the last few years: the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. But make sure you can stomach it, the season finales are sickeningly evil (especially season 2).
I live in a harmonized country where we get to use a harmonized version of bing. It filters out many legitimate search requests, not just porn. You might search for something completely innocuous that happens to have the word girl in it (e.g. the TV series golden girls from the 80s), and it will be harmonized, I mean censored.
The filters are necessarily inaccurate and will affect legitimate search queries. You probably wouldn't use them in your western country even if you were a conservative Puritan.