"The Golden Girls certainly proved that there was a large audience for a show about older women"
About this Quote
Marlo Thomas’s line lands like a gentle corrective to an industry that spent decades pretending older women were a niche. By naming The Golden Girls as proof, she’s not just praising a hit sitcom; she’s pointing at the spreadsheet logic that quietly governs who gets to be seen. “Certainly proved” carries a hint of exasperation: of course there was an audience. The only mystery is why television needed to be convinced.
The intent is pragmatic and political at once. Thomas, an actress who built a career in an era where women’s “expiration dates” were treated as programming strategy, is arguing for market reality as a lever against ageism and sexism. She’s not invoking dignity or fairness first; she’s invoking ratings. That’s savvy. In Hollywood, moral appeals can be ignored, but a demonstrated audience forces executives to rewrite their assumptions.
The subtext: older women weren’t absent from screens because they lacked stories; they were absent because gatekeepers lacked imagination and risk tolerance. The Golden Girls didn’t merely feature older women, it centered them as funny, sexual, complicated, and culturally current - all the traits TV routinely reserves for men well past middle age. Thomas’s phrasing also nods to the quiet insult embedded in “older women” as a category, as if youth is the default human setting and everyone else is a special-interest group.
Context matters: a pre-streaming landscape where a handful of networks defined “mainstream.” A show like The Golden Girls didn’t just find an audience; it rewired what “audience” was allowed to mean.
The intent is pragmatic and political at once. Thomas, an actress who built a career in an era where women’s “expiration dates” were treated as programming strategy, is arguing for market reality as a lever against ageism and sexism. She’s not invoking dignity or fairness first; she’s invoking ratings. That’s savvy. In Hollywood, moral appeals can be ignored, but a demonstrated audience forces executives to rewrite their assumptions.
The subtext: older women weren’t absent from screens because they lacked stories; they were absent because gatekeepers lacked imagination and risk tolerance. The Golden Girls didn’t merely feature older women, it centered them as funny, sexual, complicated, and culturally current - all the traits TV routinely reserves for men well past middle age. Thomas’s phrasing also nods to the quiet insult embedded in “older women” as a category, as if youth is the default human setting and everyone else is a special-interest group.
Context matters: a pre-streaming landscape where a handful of networks defined “mainstream.” A show like The Golden Girls didn’t just find an audience; it rewired what “audience” was allowed to mean.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
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