Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Before Titus, Captain Holt, Mitchell, Cam, Will, Jack, and Ellen, there was Coco — the gay houseboy that served saucy one-liners and cheesecake in seven seasons of The Golden Girls. Charles Levin‘s drag performer-turned-housekeeper confronted drama and connected with his found family in Miami, and provided primetime audiences with a prominent and positive gay character during the height of the AIDS crisis.
At least, that’s what could have happened. Instead of experiencing the alternate show laid out above, newcomers discovering Golden Girls on Hulu will be surprised to see a fifth character traveling down that road and back again for only one episode. Coco didn’t get to write the book on LGBT representation in sitcoms the way series creator Susan Harris originally wanted. Instead, he’s just a footnote.
The road to The Golden Girls‘ debut took a few detours. As detailed in Jim Colucci’s Golden Girls Forever: An Unauthorized Look Behind The Lanai, The Golden Girls owes its existence partially to a joke made between sixty-something actresses Selma Diamond and Doris Roberts during an NBC fall preview special. Their riff about a show starring retirees in Florida titled Miami Nice inspired NBC higher-ups Brandon Tartikoff and Warren Littlefield to develop a show with that exact premise. Littlefield, NBC’s VP of comedy programs, then found the right writer to develop the idea: Susan Harris.
Harris, who had previously created the sitcoms Soap and Benson, wasn’t interested in returning to television — until she heard the word “elderly” in Littlefield’s pitch. The chance to write about an underrepresented age group spoke to her, as did Littlefield’s insistence that the show have a gay character in the main cast. Ironically, the character that would become a one-episode-wonder was a big deal for the creators. At the time, gay characters were mostly relegated to appearing on very special episodes where the straight leading cast had to deal with a gay guest star. Harris was on board with the idea, as she’d already pushed primetime boundaries with Soap, a show that featured one of the first recurring gay characters in Billy Crystal’s Jodie Dallas.
Miami Nice turned into The Golden Girls, and Harris’ original pilot script featured plenty of Coco and his zingers — way more than what you see in the finished episode. According to some of the actors that auditioned for the role (Dom Irrera, Paul Provenza, Jeffrey Jones) the character was also intended to be a drag queen. Sensing that “Coco the catty drag queen/houseboy” probably didn’t sound as progressive as intended, the pilot’s director Jay Sandrich advised Charles Levin to audition for the gay character without any stereotypical affectations. Levin bombed and the producers told him to just play the same kind of gay character he’d previously played in a few episodes of the drama Hill Street Blues. Levin did, and he got the part. Coco was cast, publicity photos with the quintet were shot and Golden Girls was about to score a big win for representation — at least that was the plan.
The Golden Girls pilot taping is the stuff of legend. The audience was thrilled to see three ’70s sitcom vets (Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, and Betty White) share the stage. The big surprise, though, was newcomer Estelle Getty. While Sophia’s hair and makeup are noticeably off model in the pilot, her blunt wit is on point. With every nailed one-liner, Getty — in her first lead television role — proved she could hold her own with the pros. She was bumped up from a recurring character to a regular after the taping.
The audience was also pleasantly surprised by Levin’s Coco, as an out-and-proud gay man was still a very rare sight on TV in 1985. Coco has the distinction of being in the very first scene of Golden Girls‘ very first episode. Coco cooks enchiladas rancheros, much to Dorothy’s gastrointestinal fright, while schoolteacher Dorothy vents about kids these days and their wild hairstyles. The pilot doesn’t leave Coco’s sexuality undefined, either. When Rose worries about how they’ll be able to afford a house if Blanche does get married, she says, “What do we have for collateral, a gay cook?” Sophia, in her stroke-induced blunt fashion, later calls Coco an “okay petunia.” Golden Girls didn’t want to keep Coco in a closet.
He was, however, left on the cutting room floor. Extensive edits had to be made once the pilot ended up being five minutes too long. Coco’s scenes were the first to go. As you can see in the finished pilot, later reshoots removed even more of him from the episode. When Blanche returns from her date and tells Dorothy, Rose, and Coco that she’s getting married, Coco mysteriously disappears when the scene continues after a commercial break. After all the edits and reshoots, the “fancy man” (Sophia’s words) does little more than serve drinks and fret silently. When the network decided to pick up The Golden Girls, Coco wasn’t brought along for the ride.
Golden Girls pushed boundaries by starring a demographic that’s still underrepresented today: women over fifty. The Golden Girls is a show developed by a woman about four women. In addition to the standard sitcom plots, the show aggressively tackles women’s issues and elderly issues — sometimes even while the girls are dressed like nuns, male golfers, or poultry. Considering how few sitcoms had all-female casts in the decades leading up to 1985, Golden Girls needed to be about the girls. It’s hard to see how Coco could have been anything other than a fifth wheel.
His role in the show is also peculiar; He was made a houseboy because, as Littlefield originally pitched, the girls wouldn’t want to do housework after spending decades picking up after their husbands and kids. That idea makes sense in theory, but it’s off-putting in execution. Viewers relate to the girls because they still struggle with money and jobs; even Sophia gets a job at a fast food joint at one point. Having a live-in housekeeper gives the girls a higher status than many of the show’s plots, which oftentimes paint them as underdogs, necessitate. There’s also a cognitive dissonance in the pilot as Blanche praises her friends Rose and Dorothy for being her family — and then the girls continually ignore Coco as if he’s one of their many ferns.
It is a shame that hit sitcoms went without a gay regular in the years between Soap and Ellen, but there wasn’t room for Coco in Golden Girls. Fortunately the show’s initial, gay-inclusive intention manifested in other ways after Coco was cut. The show averaged around one LGBT-centric episode a season, a major step up considering sitcoms usually had one LGBT episode during their entire run. The writing staff, which included a number of gay writers, also tackled gay issues using the four leads as stand-ins. 1990’s “72 Hours” gave Rose an AIDS scare after she received a blood transfusion. In the episode, Blanche tells Rose that AIDS is “not a bad person’s disease,” a massively important statement considering the silence about AIDS as it ravaged the gay community in the ’80s. The show continually focused on the quartet as an unconventional family, like when Dorothy, Blanche, and Sophia are denied hospital visitation rights when Rose falls ill. The show may not have had a gay character, but it dealt with gay issues in a more honest and upfront fashion than any other show up until that point. The LGBT community, particularly gay men, have latched onto the show because of this.
Who knows how Coco could have changed The Golden Girls or, possibly, sitcom history? As it stands now, he’s a low-difficulty question at Golden Girls trivia nights across the country. But the ballad of Coco, how he came to be and where he ended up, reveals that Golden Girls didn’t give up when it came to representation. Coco didn’t work out the way the producers wanted, but that didn’t deter them from telling those stories. There may not be a gay man proudly calling himself a Coco, but there are legions of Blanches, Roses, Dorothies, and Sophias.
Brett White is a comedy writer living in New York City. His work can be heard at Left Handed Radio and seen at UCB1. He watches awful Christmas movies, and tweets about them at @brettwhite.
