Ok, I have had this idea for a sitcom face off for a long
time but put it off because I have strong feelings for one of the shows.
However, this face off is so perfect that I can't resist. Let's see if I can be
impartial and fair, as we present
The Golden Girls was a break through hit for NBC. This show made sitcoms on Saturday nights work, and even won an Emmy for Outstanding Sitcom in 1985. Designing Women came along about a year later on CBS. I don’t think it was ever quite the hit that Golden Girls was, but it a strong show in its own right. Both of these shows were essentially the same thing, four strong women sharing their lives and being bff’s. The major difference was their ages, which we’ll get into. Yeah these shows were kind of girlie, but while I may not admit it to many people the truth is I watched them both. Why? Let’s talk about that.
CATEGORY 1:
DOROTHY VS JULIA
Two strong characters brought to life by two well respected,
and deeply missed, actresses. These characters quite simply drove their shows.
This was especially true on The Golden Girls. When Bea Arthur left and they
tried to do The Golden Palace, it was just a mess. Julia was the strong
character on Designing Women but it always felt a little more balanced. You got
the feeling while the ladies had their quirks they were also equal. No one
looked down on each other, which you can’t quite say about Golden Girls where
teasing each other to inflate their own ego happened a lot. That’s not a bad
thing; in fact a lot of the humor came from that. But Dorothy knew she was the
smart one and I think took comfort from that. Dorothy was a substitute teacher
who had some bad luck in life. She was knocked up at a very young age, married
a loser who divorced after forty some years to run off with a younger woman.
She had been through a lot, and still managed to keep going. Dorothy was one of
the strongest characters ever, and unlike her other character Maude she was
also likable (I hated Maude, but that’s another article). She knew when to be
tough, sure, but also when to have a soft side. Julia was a widower who opened
her own design house. She had a college age son and…..that’s it. She had a
relationship which ended when he died, but what else? The famous thing about
Julia was her rants. Sure, it was funny the first few times but after awhile
her ranting was just annoying. She also had a very closed mind. If it was her
opinion, then that was it. She was always right and no one else ever was, and I
hated that about her. There is one episode where a newsstand had a picture of
woman in bondage, and Julia crashes the stand with her car she is so offended.
Ok, Julia has every right to be offended but destroying public property?? And
never mind the newsstand has every right to display what they want (to a
point). Then when her friends tell her she can’t win and to just apologize, she
refuses! She is stubborn and gets a little carried away, unlike Dorothy who was
a bit better with restraint. One episode she was going to fail the football
star which would keep him from playing, and was adamant but when things started
to get serious she took a step back and reevaluated her opinion. She knew she
wasn’t always going to be right, and while she may not have liked it she just
took it. I think it was because she had taken some big defeats in life, so she
knew life did not always work out perfectly. Julia wanted everyone to think
like her, which in the end hurt her character making her unlikable.
WINNER=DOROTHY
CATEGORY 2:
ROSE AND BLANCE VS CHARLENE AND MARY JO
I know that while Charlene and Rose have similarities, Mary
Jo and Blanche do not really. Blanche is
closer to Suzanne, but I am pairing her off in the next category. These ladies
were the core of each of their shows in that they both served the same
function. Let’s talk about Blanche and Rose first. They were two opposite ends
of the spectrum in some way. Rose was a dim wit with a big heart. Blanche was
the self-absorbed, sex crazed one. One of the funny things about this show for
me is how much I hated their characters on their earlier shows but loved them
here. Sue Ann and Vivian (on Mary Tyler Moore and Maude respectively) were
annoying characters but in this show Rose and Blanche were lots of fun. Betty
White and Rue McClanahan got everything they could out of these characters. In
fact these characters on paper are really weak. It was truly the actress’s
playing them who made them work. Mary Jo was the divorced mother struggling to
get through life, and Charlene was from the mid-west and came from a huge
family. Where Rose was dim witted I think Charlene was just more naïve. She
tended to trust everyone and take everyone at face value. Her friends often had
to point out that life just doesn’t work that way. Mary Jo was strong to but
she really really needed her friends on a daily basis. So who wins? Will be
honest, Mary Jo got annoying with her yelling and Charlene seemed to cry at the
drop of a hat. If she wasn’t crying she was giving some long hard luck speech
which the show itself even made fun of. Blanche and Rose were just stronger
people. Sure they relied on their friends when things got tough but usually
that was just to support what they already knew and felt they had to do. They
also were more fleshed out, we saw them tease each other, argue with each
other, and basically act like real friends would act. Charlene and Mary Jo felt
like sitcom friends, like they were friends because the show said so.
WINNER=ROSE AND BLANCE
CATEGORY 3
SOPHIA VS SUZANNE
Yeah, I know this matchup is a little mixed but these two
characters are matched because they are the breakthrough characters that
everyone loved. It’s safe to say that neither of these shows would have been nearly as popular if
not for Sophia and her put downs and Suzanne for her, well, personality. This
is like trying to choose your favorite child. Sophia was Dorothy’s mother of
course who came to live with the girls when her nursing home burned down. She
pretty much said whatever she wanted, at first this was blamed on a stroke she
had suffered but as the years went on that kind of got forgotten. She was the
guaranteed laugh, and we loved watching her. Her character was so popular that
she appeared in Empty Nest, Nurses, and even an episode of Blossom in a funny
dream sequence. Suzanne felt like the most real of the four ladies on her show.
She was selfish, vain, materialistic…but when the chips were down could be a
good friend and a decent person. You could see that while she pretended to not
care, deep down she really did she just wasn’t very good at showing it. This is
another one of those characters who would not be tolerated for a second in real
life. She was a former beauty queen who wanted to be rich and wealthy, no
matter what she had to to achieve that goal. So who wins? Sophia was a great
character, but let’s be honest she wasn’t a new character. We had seen Irene
Ryan do the same thing some twenty years earlier. Suzanne was a bit different,
and it’s been said paved the way for the Elaine Benis’s and Karen Walker’s that
came after her. As I noted she was the one character who felt real, and unlike
her sister Julia she could see the other side of an argument. In fact very
often that was her role on the show, to argue the other side even if it was a
little misguided. So as much as I loved Sophia I am giving the award to the
more original and more memorable character. When Suzanne left her show sucked,
would the same have happened if Sophia had left? Hard to say. By the way I know
that Delta Burke had problems we will get to that, I’m not going to let that
damn the character she played so well.
WINNER=SUZANNE
CATEGORY 4
SUPPORTING CAST
No contest here, it seems like that always happens one show
will have a great supporting cast while the other will not. The best I could do
for The Golden Girls was Stan, Dorothy’s ex who had a recurring role and
appeared a lot. The Golden Girls had many relatives come and go over the years;
in fact you had to wonder how many family members these girls had!, but none of
them really stuck very long. Designing Women had Anthony, who served two
functions. One was being the only male in the cast. But more importantly his
function was to be the voice of reason. When the girls argued it was very one
sided, and Anthony was very often the one who had to come in and explain that
there was another point of view and the issue wasn’t always black and white.
For instance in one episode when Julia is convinced Suzanne wearing black face
as part of a performance is racist, it’s Anthony who says that sometimes those
things aren’t if it’s in the right context, that the issue is more complicated
than that. The Golden Girls had no equivalent to him in their show although
Sophia occasionally did fill that role (of course not counting the gay houseboy
in the pilot). The other Designing Women regular I had to mention was Bernice,
who was so memorable by being dim witted. She kind took over as the Rose
character since Charlene wasn’t really dumb. Alice Ghostly was hilarious on
Bewitched and she was hilarious on this show, with her silly comments. I think
what made it worked was that we could tell she had no idea what she was talking
about really. Not much to say here, there is a clear winner in this one.
WINNER-DESIGNING WOMEN
CATEGORY 5-THEME SONG
Thank You for Being a Friend is a classic while Georgia On
My Mind is a great tune which is actually the state song of Georgia. Which is
the better theme song? No contest here, “Thank You For Being a Friend” is a
great tune which truly captures the heart of the show but Georgia On My Mind is
just a better song. Tough call.
WINNER=DESIGNING WOMEN
CATEGORY 6 PREMISE
This is where it always gets interesting. Which of these
shows told their stories better? I always found it odd that the older ladies
were “girls” while the younger ladies were “women”, but that’s probably just
semantics. The Golden Women doesn’t have the same ring and Designing Girls
sounds like little kids. And yes, I’m stalling. The Golden Girls was such a
good show, though the old age jokes were kind of annoying. This was one show
aimed at retired women. Why did I watch it when I was a boy in high school? It
was funny, ‘nuff said. I loved the ladies to, how many shows have three pro’s
in there cast? You knew this show was
going to be solid as long as the writing held up. Designing Women had their
light stuff to, and some of the gags could be downright silly. I enjoyed the
show as a kid but when I got older it wore on me. Where these shows diverge for
me is how they dealt with the serious stuff. Both shows tackled sensitive
subjects, but believe it or not I prefer the way The Golden Girls did it
better. As an example, both shows did an episode on AIDS. Designing Women had a
new character that had AIDS and happened to be gay, when a shrewish woman we
had never met before talks about how “those people are getting what they
deserve”. Enraged, Julia proceeds to throw the woman out as she lectures her on
being so closed minded. Ok, strong moment but how did Golden Girls tackle it?
Rose finds out she might be HIV positive, and as she waits for the result she
whines that Blanche should have AIDS due to her lifestyle. Blanche points out
that AIDS is not “gods way of punishing people for being bad”. Rose apologizes;
she was just bitching and didn’t mean any harm. Same message, but the way it’s
delivered on The Golden Girls is just better. It doesn’t involve two characters
we never met, it involved two main leads that we knew very well! I guess that’s
the difference between these shows, on The Golden Girls things happened to them
while on Designing Women things just happened, and we get the girls responding
to it. Sometimes they’d get carried away to, not all men are evil and while
Georgia is a lovely state I don’t think it’s the amazing paradise that this
shows makes it out to be. That “women of Atlanta” speech in one episode kills
me, and the women everywhere else not classy and sophisticated? Only Atlanta
huh? The Christmas episode is so sappy, and there is one episode where Charlene
has a baby I can’t even watch! They hammer in a lesson on race which is so unneeded
that the episode is a turn off for me. I never understood why this show was so
loved, the liberal stance is so infuriating and issues are never discussed
evenly. The women are right, except Suzanne, case closed. Golden Girls they had
honest discussions around that kitchen table and all points of view were
covered. Golden Girls also knew how to be funny while also being serious, which
Designing Women didn’t do as often. By the way, to be fair they did light
episodes that didn’t have any social significance. One where Julia gets her
head stuck in a banister comes to mind.
WINNER-THE GOLDEN GIRLS
CATEGORY 7 JUMPING THE SHARK
Which show was worst in the end. Any question who is going
to win? Designing Women was awful after Delta Burke left! Yeah the women they
brought in were ok, but it just wasn’t the same show. Of course Jean Smart also
left, but she chose to leave because I think she was sick of playing whiny
Charlene. Can’t blame her for that. Delta Burke left under, well, different
circumstances. As the show progressed she began to gain weight, and this put
her at odds with the producer. The fights they had were tabloid heaven, and
finally they wrote Suzanne out and she never returned. This of course mortally
wounded the show and it never recovered. On The Golden Girls, Bea Arthur wanted
out and the creators new no casting change was going to help. It just wasn’t
going to be the same show, so they cancalled. It was getting kind of old
anyway. The final episode was a strong one, showing Dorothy finally getting
married and moving out. The down side is her character is the only one which
got a ending because the spin off was all set to go. So, we end up with an
ending which while not the most satisfying is also pretty good. Designing
Women’s last episode was so dumb, and not even really a series finale, I am not
even going to discuss it. The winner is clear.
Final Thoughts-Yeah, I watched Designing Women but I
actually liked The Golden Girls. Better writing, better comedy, better
cast….case closed.
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