This fall, the sitcom The Golden Girls turns 40 years old. Although a new episode hasn’t aired since 1992, and its four stars have now all passed away, the show remains a vibrant part of American pop culture. It lives on in syndication, in TikTok clips and Instagram memes, on T-shirts and on coffee mugs, and at fan conventions and drag shows. It has even inspired multiple books, including a recent collection on its social and cultural impact.
The series itself was created by Susan Harris, one of the most important — and underrated — voices in American comedy. While she has never received the recognition afforded to her male mentors, Garry Marshall and Norman Lear, Harris was integral to bringing a feminist sensibility and consciousness to primetime television. Her legacy continues to shape popular sitcoms today. Shows with women protagonists and nuanced explorations of their personal and professional lives reflect her wit, irreverence, and commitment to social justice.
In 1970, Harris was a single mother when she wrote a prospective script for a drama series, Then Came Bronson. It became her first television writing credit. While the show proved to be short-lived, it opened the door to television writing for Harris. She moved on to write for The Partridge Family, All in the Family, and Love, American Style before working on the Bea Arthur-led sitcom Maude.
In 1972, while working on Maude, Harris wrote one of the most famous and controversial episodes in sitcom history. In the two-part episode, “Maude’s Dilemma,” Maude decided to have an abortion. The episode aired in November 1972, two months before the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade. It was one of the first times that feminist politics around reproductive rights were so openly expressed in a primetime sitcom.
CBS reported that an estimated 65 million Americans watched one or both parts of the episode, and the show received over 7,000 letters from concerned viewers. The episode was typical of an era in broadcast history where television comedies explored important social issues from multiple perspectives. Reflecting on the episode in 1992, Harris observed that the political landscape in the 1990s would have made it much harder to air such an episode, because “the networks would feel less likely that they could take a stand.”
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Harris’ blend of sharp wit and social commentary continued with Soap, a show she both created and co-wrote. Like Maude, Soap was politically groundbreaking because the cast of characters included Jodie, the first recurring gay character on primetime television, portrayed by comedy legend, Billy Crystal. Unlike most gay representations at the time, Jodie defied expectations: he was neither reduced to a stereotype nor doomed to a tragic fate.
Harris also challenged racial stereotypes. Soap featured the character Benson, a butler, who was portrayed by Black actor Robert Guillaume and who had a superior intellect and cutting sense of humor. He often made his befuddled employers the target of his sharp wit. Harris created a spinoff starring Guillaume, entitled Benson, which followed the character’s ascent from household service to public service (as the lieutenant governor). Guillaume’s performance in Benson earned him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. He was the first Black actor to win the award.
In 1985, Harris’ new sitcom premiered: The Golden Girls. The idea of a sitcom starring older women came from NBC executive Warren Littlefield. During The NBC All Star Hour special in 1984, seasoned actresses Selma Diamond and Doris Roberts performed a comedy bit confusing the new show Miami Vice for Miami Nice, which caught Littlefield’s attention. He realized that networks were failing to tap into a pool of comedic talent: older women. When Littlefield expressed interest in a series that could showcase older women’s comedic abilities to producers Tony Thomas and Paul Junger Witt, Witt had the perfect writer in mind: his wife, Susan Harris.
Harris took the creative lead on the new show, establishing its format and sensibility, as well as writing the pilot episode. The characters Harris created would prove iconic. Blanche, an amorous widow, takes in two roommates: Dorothy, a no-nonsense divorcee from Brooklyn, and Rose, a sweet but simpleminded Minnesotan. The fourth roommate was Sophia, Dorothy’s wisecracking mother, who moves into the house after a fire at her retirement community. (A fifth character, Blanche’s gay cook, Coco, was dropped from the show after the pilot allegedly to focus more on the four women, though network reluctance over a gay character probably factored in.)
With so many talented actresses to consider, casting proved a challenge. Harris wrote Dorothy for Maude star Bea Arthur, but the actress was wary to take the part because it seemed too similar to Maude. Yet, when she heard Rue McClanahan would play the flirtatious Blanche and Betty White would play the naive Rose, she was intrigued — because it involved the actresses playing against character type from their respective roles on Maude and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The producers cast Estelle Getty, who had gained fame on the Broadway stage in Torch Song Trilogy, as Sophia. She proved to be perfect person to play Dorothy’s 80-year-old mother— even though she was actually a year younger than Arthur.
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In the pilot episode, Sophia jokes, “I never get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I go in the morning, every morning, like clockwork. At 7 AM, I pee. Unfortunately, I don’t wake up til 8.” The punchline reflected Harris’ playful sense of humor. Her uncompromising social consciousness also shined through from the beginning. The first episode also discussed aging, elder care, and losing a spouse to death or divorce. Harris compassionately explored these issues that many women faced later in life — and which rarely went represented on television.
From the beginning, The Golden Girls was a critical success. The New York Times reported the show “has been getting the most enthusiastic advance word-of-mouth since The Cosby Show.” Even though The Washington Post chided Harris’ “bathroom humor,” its critic admitted the show had well-developed characters. Audiences agreed: The Golden Girls finished its freshman year in the top 10 shows on television at a time when new hit sitcoms were a rarity. It went on to win the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series for its first season, besting ratings powerhouses Cheers and The Cosby Show.
Even though Harris only wrote the occasional episode after the pilot, her investment in foregrounding the issues that older women face in their everyday lives resonated throughout the show’s seven seasons. A prime example was the two-part episode, “Sick and Tired,” in which Dorothy struggled to find a diagnosis because male doctors repeatedly dismissed her symptoms. In addition to women’s health, The Golden Girls explored ageism, addiction, sexual harassment, gay marriage, homelessness, and the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Perhaps Golden Girls’ enduring legacy was its format. Harris revised the family sitcom, replacing the nuclear family unit with a found family unit. (The celebration of self-selected family was one of the many reasons that the show had a strong fandom among the LGBT community.) Furthermore, it centered four older women not only as mothers and wives, but as independent, opinionated, and sexual people. This template would later be replicated and reinvented by a plethora of series: Designing Women, Living Single, Sex and the City, Girlfriends, and Girls, among them. Like Golden Girls, many of them were women-led, both on screen and behind the scenes.
Susan Harris is rarely mentioned alongside Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, or Mary Tyler Moore, but her contribution and influence on television comedy is palpable through the enduring legacy of The Golden Girls. In a career spanning 40 years, she created 13 sitcoms, many of which centered on women’s daily lives. She also was a powerful writer-producer when the opportunity was granted to too few women.
Her pathbreaking work opened the door for countless women writers and producers in primetime television, especially those who used the sitcom to explore the joys and challenges of womanhood. The Golden Girls, in its celebration of romance, mother-daughter bonds, and the family we choose, glorified the different kinds of loving relationships that enrich women’s lives with joy and good humor.
So the next time you sit down to laugh with Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia, remember the woman behind the scenes who brought them to life.
Peter C. Kunze is assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. He is the author of Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
