When The Golden Girls debuted in 1985, Blanche (Rue McClanahan), Dorothy (Bea Arthur) and Rose (Betty White) - pictured with Sophia (Estelle Getty) - were in their 50s. By today's standards, they seemed much older. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: Touchstone Television/Courtesy Everett Collection)Picture it: I was a little girl at my grandma's house, watching the NBC comedy about Miami-based best friends turned roommates Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur), Rose Nylund (Betty White), Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan) and Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty) navigating life as widows or divorcées. They'd talk about sex, aging, men, menopause, womanhood, race and LGBTQ issues - often over cheesecake - in a way that women of that age had never been seen doing on television before.
Short gray hair, shoulder pads and communal living with gossipy catch-ups around the kitchen table or on the lanai. That was my vision of growing older, shaped by my '80s TV education from The Golden Girls.
The show, which premiered 40 years ago, on Sept. 14, 1985, was an instant hit. For six of the seven years it ran, it was in the Nielsen ratings' top 10 list of most-watched shows. It won back-to-back Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1986 and 1987, and each of the four stars won individual acting Emmys. Currently, The Golden Girls sits in the No. 11 spot on YouGov's most popular all-time TV shows via data collected this year.
AdvertisementAdvertisementWhat I didn't know then was that the women being sold to the audience as late-in-life senior citizens weren't actually that old. Marketed as being in their golden years, the characters - independent women with fulfilling lives and friendships - were actually in their 50s when the show began, with the exception of Dorothy's mom, Sophia. In real life, McClanahan was just 51, Arthur and White were 63, and Getty was 62.I'm far from the only one who thought that. A meme that regularly pops up in my Facebook timeline shows a cast photo alongside the surprisingly young age of each character. It has led to a trend of modern women having the realization that they're in the same era as the girls, and along with it usually comes the observation that, wow, women in their 50s and 60s sure look different in 2025.
Blanche, Dorothy and Rose were independent women who leaned on each other to work out life's challenges - often around the kitchen table. (Alice S. Hall/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)When it first aired, the groundbreaking show offered a rare glimpse at women of a certain age, who were often invisible onscreen in that era. The fashion and beauty reflected the era, but the unfiltered characters still feel ahead of their time.
Today, The Golden Girls has become a generational reference for many women over 50 - a reminder of how dramatically aging and society's expectations around it have evolved.A cultural touchstone for midlife womenThe idea that the friends who became chosen family looked and acted much older than they were has come up in conversations for Yahoo's Unapologetically series, which features interviews with women over 40 talking about aging and confidence. Time after time, people reference The Golden Girls as a marker for what they thought midlife would look like - or the idea that getting older is different from what they thought it would be.
AdvertisementAdvertisementSelf-help guru Mel Robbins told Yahoo that The Golden Girls shaped her early expectations of what life after 50 would be like."I thought 50 would be time to get retired, time to start looking old, time to be irrelevant to society because, you know, it's about the 20-year-old celebrities, and we're like the old mayors getting thrown out into the corral," the bestselling author and motivational podcast host said in June.
For Robbins, the opposite was true in real life. She feels more comfortable in her skin at 56 than ever before.
Mel Robbins feels she's just getting warmed up in her 50s. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images for Mel Robbins)TV personality Kelly Rizzo, 46, expressed a similar sentiment about how her "goalposts" have shifted.
AdvertisementAdvertisement"Twenty-five years ago, 45 looked very different than it does today," she said. "Now [that I'm here], it's a very different experience. ... And then when I look [ahead to 65] - to me right now that still seems a bit old - but when I get there, I'm sure times will even change a little bit more."When it comes to The Golden Girls age meme, Rizzo blamed the era's fashion and beauty norms for making women look more matronly than they do today."It's the hair!" she said. "There was an expectation that when you're in your 50s, you dress a certain way and look a certain way. Now, there [are] really no rules anymore."These changing attitudes aren't just anecdotal. They're reflected in research on how women perceive themselves across generations.
AdvertisementAdvertisementYahoo's own YouGov polling on antiaging culture in May showed that 55% of women aged 40 and older