Our Favorite Gay TV Podcast Wrote a F*cked Up, Funny New Episode of ‘The Golden Girls’
It’s been nearly three decades since fans of The Golden Girls were able to sit down in front of their TVs and watch a new episode of their four favorite ladies — Dorothy, Rose, Blanche and Sophia — demonstrating what true friendship is all about. Oh, what fans of the beloved sitcom wouldn’t do for just one more episode! Well, our friends over at Gayest Episode Ever — a podcast that looks at the LGBT-centric episodes of classic sitcoms — took that as a challenge, and voilà: a new Golden Girls episode that is so dark and twisted and laugh-out-loud funny that even non-fans of the female-fronted show will wish it had gotten an airdate.
In the past, Gayest Episode Ever has examined episodes of all our favorite shows from back in the day: Cheers, All in the Family, Married With Children, Designing Women, Roseanne, Frasier and so many more. (Journalist Drew Mackie — who, alongside screenwriter Glen Lakin, hosts the podcast — has in the past written about several of those episodes for Hornet; you can find them here.)
But for Gayest Episode Ever‘s 50th episode, the podcast had something different and extra special planned: not just a spec script for a new Golden Girls episode, but a table read of that crazy episode featuring hilarious actors.
In this new Golden Girls episode, written by Lakin years ago, Blanche accidentally “sexes a man to death,” and the girls have to help her hide the body. (Hey, we said it was fucked up.)
For the table read, Blanche is played by Sam Pancake, who in Los Angeles stars as Sophia in the drag stage show Golden Girlz Live but has always wanted to play Blanche; Sophia is played by Ted Biaselli, Netflix’s head of original programming; Dorothy is played by Meghan Parks; Rose by Tony Rodriguez; and Violet Dozer, Rose’s nemesis from St. Olaf, by Janie Haddad Tompkins.
“I wrote it during a very uncertain period in my career, mostly as a love letter to the kind of show that made me want to work in TV in the first place,” Lakin tells Hornet of his spec script. “As with a lot of my writing, I challenged myself to make the unfunny funny and to create an episode that was very much the opposite of The Golden Girls that was still, undeniably, THE GOLDEN GIRLS.”
Consider this new Golden Girls episode a special treat for the many fans who have supported Gayest Episode Ever, a podcast currently thriving in its third season.
“When we started this show, we didn’t think anyone would care about our opinions about classic sitcoms, but enough people did that we felt like doing something weird and creative with a show that means a lot to us and to a lot of queer folks throughout the world,” says Mackie. “It’s really cool all the different ways this show can keep growing, almost 30 years after it went off the air.”
