The temporary solution was, as it so often will be, a manservant named Coco. But not a man who would bring sexual tension into the house: That was a job for Stan Zbornak and the parade of mostly expendable suitors who would cycle in and then out of the girls’ pink living room. Its whole point, from its conception, was to be slightly subversive-it was to be about women, according to Warren Littlefield, NBC’s then-vice president for series, after “society has written them off, has said they’re over the hill.” A sitcom that didn’t just star women, but that starred only women! And: older women! This was a fairly new and weird thing in 1985, a thing that NBC executives weren’t sure, as the old saying goes, “America was ready for.” They needed some kind of buffer, they thought, to defeminize the whole thing just a little bit, to make it more 1985-America-friendly.
Coco-“the fancy man in the kitchen,” Sophia takes to calling him-was part of that first show, in some part, because The Golden Girls was so revolutionary.
