The Golden Palace has gotten a bit of a bad rap over the past 30 years. A one-season spin-off of The Golden Girls, it essentially subtracts Bea Arthur, who was done with the show, and adds Don Cheadle, Cheech Marin and a hotel. Was it as big a disaster as people thought it was? Now that it’s on Hulu, people can see for themselves. Read on for more…
Opening Shot: Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur) has gotten married and moved out of the Miami home she shared with her mother, Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty) and friends Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan) and Rose Nylund (Betty White). Now, movers are coming to move the other three women out.
The Gist: Why are they moving out? Because Blanche convinced Rose and Sophia to invest in a Miami hotel called The Golden Palace. Rose starts to get nervous, because “my whole life is here,” but Blanche tells her that this is an exciting fresh start. And besides, with all the people going through the house (especially through Blanche’s bedroom), they might as well have been running a hotel. As the three women sit on the wicker-and-coral-fabric couch, the movers pick them and the couch up and move them out.
At the hotel, the women walk in and are introduced to the manager, Roland Wilson (Don Cheadle). He’s got a foster son, Oliver Webb (Billy L. Sullivan), living with him at the hotel; Oliver is afraid that the new owners, whom Roland think own a successful lodging chain, will kick him out.
But Roland isn’t the only one surprised after he meets the trio. They find out that he’s pretty much the only person doing anything in the hotel. The only other full-time staff is the new cook, Chuy Castillos (Cheech Marin), who ends up quitting because Sophia insists that all meals will be Italian dishes. That’s because the old owners fired everyone else to make it look like they’re turning a profit. In fact, if they don’t make their monthly note in a week, the three of them will lose the place and be broke.
As angry as Sophia and Rose are, Blanche manages to convince them that they all have to work hard in order to make it work. And with a group of travel agents coming (remember, this is 1992), they’ll need the week to go well so they can attract more business.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Golden Girls, of course, given that this show was a continuation/spin-off of that classic series, airing for the 1992-93 season on CBS after the original’s seven-season run on NBC.
Our Take: Hulu debuted the one and only season of The Golden Palace on January 10 in anticipation of Betty White’s 100th birthday this month. Of course, considering Betty White’s recent death, it’s a chance to give viewers as much Betty White content as possible. And it’s not a surprise that White continues to be the same standout that she was on The Golden Girls, with Rose’s stories of St. Olaf and her precision comic timing in top form.
The rest of the show? Well, without Bea Arthur something just felt off. The pieces are there, of course. It’s not like McClanahan and Getty all of a sudden stopped being funny. And it’s not like there was a new set of writers who didn’t know the characters; Susan Harris was still running the show and longtime writers like Marc Cherry and Mitch Hurwitz are prominently featured in the credits. Those factors save the show from being the disaster people thought it was over the past 30 years.
And, listen, the additions to the cast weren’t terrible either. Marin and Getty had some good chemistry with their back and forth, even in the scene where Chuy asks Sophia for his job back. Sullivan overacts a bit, leaning into the character with a non-geographical “tough” accent that made him sound like an extra from Welcome Back, Kotter. Cheadle, all of 28 at the time and in his first series regular role, showed that he had the chops to hang with Rue, Betty and Estelle even that early in his career.
In fact, he was featured in the 11th episode, “Camp Town Races Aren’t Nearly As Fun As They Used To Be,” where he objects to Blanche displaying a Confederate flag to greet guests from a women’s organization known to be full of bigoted members. His monologues where he explains to Blanche why the flag is so repulsive to him pre-dates the current effort to remove that flag from state buildings and elsewhere by 25 years, but they sound contemporary and affecting nevertheless.
It does show that the series could have chugged along for multiple seasons with Cheadle bouncing off White, McClanahan and Getty. But it still wouldn’t have felt quite right, because Arthur wasn’t there. Even the outlandish idea that Rose, Blanche and Sophia could run a hotel would have worked with Dorothy there to explode at every little thing. But without her, the chemistry just wasn’t the same. And the scenes with Marin and especially Sullivan felt more forced than they should have been. The two-part episode where Dorothy comes back to check in on her mother and maybe have her move back in with her proves this.
Sex and Skin: As was the usual, it was all talk, especially when it came to Blanche.
Parting Shot: Over the credits, Roland, Chuy and Oliver join the women for cheesecake. They ask how it works, and Rose launches into one of her St. Olaf stories. The three of them seem interested, which is when Sophia and Blanche say, “Rookies,” and leave the kitchen.
Sleeper Star: Did we mention how good Don Cheadle was here? We did?
Most Pilot-y Line: A sequence between Oliver and Blanche where Oliver makes it look like he’s living at the hotel all alone smacks of an old-fashioned sitcom misunderstanding, something that we imagine the writers needed to do because they had no idea what to do with Oliver from the jump.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Golden Palace may not be as classic as The Golden Girls was, but it’s still funny and worth bingeing, especially if you’re jonesing for more Betty White as Rose Nylund.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
Stream The Golden Palace On Hulu