For seven seasons, TheGolden Girls brought groundbreaking comedy to the small screen, and madeicons of its four leading ladies. Thenin 1992, three of the Girls packed upthe house on Miami’s Richmond Street, and moved to the beach – and to CBS.
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| 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 |
Producer Tony Thomas remembers the decision to take thethree remaining Girls in such a newdirection. “You don’t replace Bea – itwould have been ridiculous to have someone try,” he explains. Thomas says that he and fellow producers, Golden Girls creator Susan Harris andher husband Paul Witt, “have always liked the idea of doing a show about lifein a hotel. There’s something appealingabout 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 hotelwould put them in contact on a regular basis with interesting people, and keepthem active as they learned to do something different. We couldn’t do ‘Golden Girls Redux’ or ‘GoldenGirls Continued.’ We had to make itdifferent and hopefully comfortable.”
The Old College Try
The cast of GoldenPalace boasted not only three sitcom heavyweights in Betty White, RueMcClanahan and Estelle Getty, but also comedy legend Cheech Marin, and future House of Lies star Don Cheadle as thehotel’s desk clerk, Roland Wilson. Andlike the Girls before it, Palace also boasted some of today’shottest comedy writing talents among its staff.
But writer Mitchell Hurwitz, who would later create CBS’sitcom The Ellen Show before findingfame with Arrested Development, remembershis colleagues’ unease with the Palacepremise from the start. “People reallyrelated to The Golden Girls. The husband leaves, which was something a lotof women had gone through in that generation,” he notes. But with GoldenPalace, “now we were asking the audience to relate to having to run andmanage a hotel, and clean the rooms yourself. It was an interesting premise, which created a lot of opportunities forcomedy, but it wasn’t what people came to TheGolden 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 newseaside setting. “We gave it the goodold college try, but [Golden Palace]wasn’t the right thing to do. It tookthe center out of the characters as they had been established – particularlyBlanche. She had to become abusinesswoman, and run a hotel. How didshe learn how to do that? Where did thatcome from? It required more out of theBlanche character than ever before, and I found it very hard to find the way toplay it.” Presenting the Girls without their popular fourthfriend Dorothy, McClanahan recalled, “really was like walking without oneshoe.”
AfterG*I*R*L*S
Premiering on September 18, 1992 as part of CBS’ newtwo-hour comedy block, Golden Palacewon 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 elevenseasons, there is an AfterM*A*S*H, ora Joey. And GoldenPalace would soon prove to belong to the latter category of sequel series.
“Golden Palace wasill-conceived from the start,” says another former writer, Marc Cherry, whowent on to create CBS’ sitcoms The FiveMrs. Buchanans and Some of My BestFriends before his iconic DesperateHousewives (and now, Lifetime's eagerly anticipated new series Devious Maids.) “Old ladies just don’tgo around buying hotels.”
Still, Cherry says, “GoldenPalace is no [tacky ‘80s syndicated sitcom] Small Wonder. There aremoments of the show that are actually quite good.” One particularly touching episode, he agrees,featured Ned Beatty as Blanche’s heretofore unmentioned, mentally challengedbrother. In another, lifelong animalactivist Betty White was able to highlight the sad plight of greyhoundsdiscarded by Florida racetracks. In atwo-part episode, Arthur’s Dorothy returned to visit her old friends in theirnew setting, bringing with her an hour’s worth of that old Golden magic. And throughoutits 24-episode run, Golden Palacesported cameos from the biggest stars of yesteryear, like George Burns, EddieAlbert, Tim Conway and Harvey Korman, and gave early breaks not just toCheadle, but other future comedy stars like Jack Black, Margaret Cho and BillEngvall.
“With a little more time, I think we could have gotten [Golden Palace] to be very good – but wedidn’t get there,” Witt remembers. In thespring of 1993, Palace was cancelledafter its freshman season, along withthe entire Friday comedy block.
Although Cherry says that he worried at the time that thesub-par Golden Palace would end uptarnishing the memory of its parent series, many fans have come to see the showas the Girls’ de facto eighthseason. Unlike Girls, Palace is notavailable 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 Palacelegacy. Conscious of Miami as a richethnic and racial melting pot, theshow’s producers had hired the Mexican-American actor to play the hotel’s Cubanchef Chuy Castillos; Marin says he used to refer to himself and Cheadle,surrounded by older white ladies, as “the Afro-Cuban section of the LawrenceWelk band.”
Marin says his greatest memory of Golden Palace was working with co-star Getty – but not in anymoment that showed up on screen. “Shetaught me to make a great matzoh ball, and boy, it just makes them nice andfluffy,” the 66-year-old actor remembers. “I make great matzoh ball soup to this day, for which I’m eternallygrateful – as are my children.”
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