Why I Just Can't Like "The Golden Palace"

The spinoff of "The Golden Girls" just lacks any of the magic that makes the original series so beloved.

When I first heard that Hulu was going to be streaming the entirety of The Golden Palace, the one-season spinoff of the hit The Golden Girls, I admit that I was ambivalent. I remember not especially liking the series when it was aired on Lifetime back in 2007, and so at first I thought I would give this one a pass. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wanted to give it another watch, especially in the aftermath of Betty White’s passing on the last day of 2021. 

Almost as soon as I started my re-watch, however, I realized that my antipathy toward the show was as strong as ever, and with good reason. Contrary to the received wisdom, I don’t ascribe the series’ failure–it was abruptly canceled after just one season–primarily to the absence of Bea Arthur, though certainly her lack is keenly felt from the outset. Instead, where The Golden Palace comes up short is in its inability to recapture the signature blend of humor and pathos that was always one of The Golden Girls’ greatest strengths. Just as importantly, its humor has a hardness and an acidity to it that is especially jarring juxtaposed to its predecessor and this, in conjunction with its betrayal of its characters’ core personalities, sets it up to fail from the start.

To be sure, on paper it must have seemed that the show was a sure thing. Even sans Arthur there’s an undeniable chemistry among the leads, who continue to spar with the same vehemence and intensity as before, though it’s notable that Rose, as Dorothy later notes, has become the strong one. It must have seemed a grand idea to have the girls sell the beloved house on Richmonds Street and take up ownership of a hotel (though I, personally, found this shift to be a bit jarring, since Blanche had never given any indication that she’d ever wanted to buy a manage a hotel, though she obviously spent quite a lot of her time in one). 

Time and again, however, The Golden Palace goes out of its way to focus on the negative and the downright depressing, and this dynamic emerges very soon after the premiere, in the third episode, entitled “Miles, We Hardly Knew Ye,” in which Blanche accuses Miles of cheating after seeing his name in the registry, only to realize that, in fact, it was all a mistake. When it is ultimately revealed that Miles has, in fact, been cheating on Rose and has actually fallen in love with the other woman, it hits like a bolt of thunder. Sure, Miles has shown that he’s capable of duplicity–he did fake his identity as part of the witness protection program, after all–but but this is something else altogether. Whatever else he might do, there’s no question throughout the last few seasons of The Golden Girls that Miles loves Rose and that, for her, he is the second great love of her life. To see all of that dispensed with in one (rather sloppily written) episode feels like a betrayal of those who had stuck with this new spinoff beyond the first couple of episodes, to say nothing of a betrayal of Rose herself.

That the show would decide to break up one of the best (and certainly the longest-lasting) couple from The Golden Girls was bad enough, if understandable from a certain angle. Perhaps the writers simply wanted to do more to set the characters on their own trajectories with this new iteration. However, not content with this, the writers decided to grind salt into Rose’s wound by having her unknowingly strike up a friendship with the very woman that Miles left her for. And then, to add insult to injury, they also had her plan the wedding, and the episode’s final image is of Rose, standing at the kitchen window, gazing heartbrokenly at the man she loved marrying another woman. In any other show, I’d say that this was a beautiful and poignant moment; in The Golden Palace, however, it feels like a betrayal. Surely Rose Nylund deserved better than this.

A pall even manages to hang over the one episode that should have been one of unbridled joy. I refer, of course, to the return of Bea Arthur, who came back for a special two-part episode. From the first moment, however, it’s clear that something just isn’t quite right. The trio has moved on without Dorothy, establishing their own dynamic, and the episode is a potent illustration of the truism that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. The jokes feel just slightly off, and the episode’s central conflict—over whether Sophia should live with Dorothy and Lucas or whether she should stay at the hotel—feels like a re-tread and an unnecessary replication of the last conversation the mother and daughter had before the latter’s marriage. Thus, there’s something wrenching and deeply sad about the final scene, in which Dorothy gazes longingly at the hotel lobby, clearly cognizant of the fact that she no longer has a place here. To me, this has always read as a rather dismal way to say goodbye to an iconic TV character and, as was the case with Rose, I can’t help but feel that Dorothy deserved better.

There’s nothing wrong with a sitcom leaning into the somber, of course. Indeed, that was the genius of The Golden Girls, which was a series that wasn’t afraid to tread on some very fraught emotional territory, whether that was Sophia’s wrenching grief over her son Phil’s untimely death or Blanche having to contend with her selfishness after her father’s passing. However, The Golden Girls, with a few exceptions, always knew how to braid together the sad and the happy, so that you rarely felt depressed once you finished an episode. And, when it did end on an ambiguous note, there was always a reason, e.g. the lack of resolution at the end of “Brother, Can You Spare that Jacket?” The Golden Palace, however much it may be funny at times, just can’t seem to find the right balance.

Overall, I’ve found my rewatch of The Golden Palace to be a rewarding experience, if for no other reason than that it’s always good to revisit media from a past era, in order to see whether, or if, your impressions of it have changed. While I do see the vast potential in this series, I think that my 2007 impressions were, in the main, correct. It’s an intriguing little oddity, a rare misfire for the comedic genius that is Susan Harris and a reminder that sometimes, it really is better to just let a series go rather than trying to force it to continue past its natural expiration date. 

Thus, even though I know that The Golden Palace extends the original series’ continuity, my personal headcanon will allow my four favorite girls to have the dignified and suitable ending that they originally had, poignant and sweet and joyful, just like The Golden Girls.