The Golden Girls is one of the all-time greatest sitcoms, picking up new generations of fans as the decades go by. However, one episode of the beloved series, which ran from 1985 to 1992 on NBC, ruffled some feathers, with one of the show’s writers claiming he received death threats.
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In Season 6, Episode 14 of The Golden Girls (“Sisters of the Bride”), the show featured an LGBTQ+ wedding. Blanche’s brother Clayton, who came out as gay in Season 4, tied the knot. Of course, Blanche (Rue McClanahan) didn’t take the news smoothly at first.
“We came up with the idea, let’s bring him back. And she thinks it was a phase and he’s probably over it,” Marc Cherry, who penned the episode with then-writing partner Jamie Wooten, recalled on the Soapy podcast via Parade. “But he comes back with a guy, and the premise episode is he’s announcing they’re getting married.”
Back in the 1990s, when gay marriage was “very much illegal,” Cherry noted that many gay couples found their own way, holding non-legally binding ceremonies to celebrate their love anyway. “So we do our episode and, if we weren’t the first, we were only the second show to do something about gay marriage,” he explained.
Some Golden Girls Fans Weren’t as Open-Minded as Blanche…
Blanche may have supported her brother’s marriage in the episode, but the enthusiasm didn’t exactly reach all of the viewers at home. “They called us up to the office a few days after the episode aired, and they said, ‘So you guys are getting death threats,’” Cherry recounted. “They literally showed us a letter that was written ‘to those f—ing Jew producers of Golden Girls.‘ To which I responded, ‘That’s weird. I’m not Jewish.’”
Facing death threats, Cherry disclosed that he and Wooten had unlisted their phone numbers after they were subjected to the cruel and hateful remarks.
“Sometimes the progress comes at a little bit of a cost to those who do it,” he added. “It’s a privilege to be in this business and to be a part of those things, with the occasional death threat thrown in just for fun,” he quipped.