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August 03, 2005  Those who know me also know of my love for The Golden Girls. A little-known fact is that, when Dorothy got married and the original NBC show went off the air in 1992, CBS brought the show back for the 1992-1993 season as The Golden Palace, in which the characters (minus Dorothy) buy and operate a fancy Miami hotel. Betty White, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty all reprised their roles, with the new additions of a young (and very New Jack) Don Cheadle as Harold, the hotel manager, and Cheech Marin as Chuy, the hotel cook. There's also a little kid who lives at the hotel. With eight seasons of the original show not being enough to satiate ravenous fans such as myself, many wanted Lifetime TV, which has nearly made its name on Golden Girls reruns and bad made-for-TV movies about abusive husbands, to broadcast the one existing season of The Golden Palace. Although it is now several years after the initial flurry of hipster interest in The Golden Girls, Lifetime has happily obliged, as the show began airing this week at 6:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. But sort of like the Republican Party, we need to be careful what we wish for, as we have now discovered why The Golden Palace lasted one season: it completely sucks. It plays like some of the really stale episodes of The Golden Girls after that show had jumped the shark, in terms of bad jokes and predictable character dynamics. But even bad episodes of the original series had a certain gravitas and street cred that the newer show completely lacks. Most of the difficulty, at first glance, seems to stem from the lack of Bea Arthur, who was not only the best actress in the cast but also gave the show its grounding and was the source of most of its best moments. Blanche, Rose and Sophia are great characters, but the reason they worked well was because they played off of Dorothy. And Dorothy oftentimes functioned as the stand-in for the audience, highlighting the other characters' idiosyncracies. With The Golden Palace, we got a show that used the hotel situation as a crutch to trot out the same tired jokes about Blanche and Rose, but without any expansion of them as characters and without any of the feminist edge that characterized The Golden Girls' first several seasons. |