Did Golden Girls ever jump the shark?

Maybe. Didn’t they start doing episodes that were like PSAs for things like medication abuse and sexual harassment at the end? They were well intentioned, but a little off putting.

I got sick and tired of those episodes r1

I found the writing and some of the episode from the last season to be some of the best so definitely not IMO. Though some of the final episodes were horrible like that Midnight Madness party and Dorothy being CEO of her former student.

R2 Two of those PSA episodes were actually titled “Sick and Tired.” Dorothy was mysteriously ill, doctors told her it was age, loneliness, mental illness and she was eventually diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. The series’s creator wrote it about her own experiences and she ultimately stopped writing because of CFS. It was “very special,” but I must have been 10 when it aired and I have never forgotten it.

I get the PSA criticisms, but if you do a show about four old people with limited means living together, there is bound to be a lot of medical shit and family drama.

The show didn't 'Jump the Shark', per se, it just sort of changed tone, the humour was gentler in the first few seasons and got a lot broader and mean-spirited toward the end of the run, but personally I thought both worked (and both didn't work at times, as well).

Yes, it’s the mean-spiritedness that I didn’t like. The charm of the show was their live for one another but the love was gone by the last season or two.

The meanness would make more sense if the show had been titled more honestly as “Old Lady Avatars of Bitter Gay Men.”

Totally random, but MTM did that when Mary Richards displayed a harder edge as a powerful, feminist, TV producer. I preferred her bright, breezy and naive. But I understand why she couldn’t stay that way.

Lol r7. The last episode should have been them peeling off the old lady masks like The Witches!😂

Were there gay writers?

R9 Marc Cherry (Desperate Housewives and Devious Maids creator) cut his teeth on Golden Girls. All the shows demonstrate his gay sensibility, including cruel appearances-based jokes.

Mean-spiritedness also happened on Gimme A Break! Nell was a caring pseudo mother at first but then she became a nasty bitch to her friend Addy.

R11=Telma Hopkins

Like others, I wouldn't say the show jumped the shark, just that for me the best episodes were in the first 4 to 5 seasons.

It jumped the shark on that Jeopardy episode when Dorothy called Merv Griffin the anti-me. LOSERS!

I don't care much for those vignette episodes where three different stories get told while the gals eat cheese cake in their kitchen.

The 1991 Golden Girls / Seinfeld crossover episode jumped the shark so much that it wasn’t even sold in syndication.

r4 I know.

That was the joke.

I preferred the humor of the last few seasons

They're airing a hurricane episode tonight. Poor taste.