Debuting almost exactly 20 years apart (give or take a few days), The Golden Girls and How I Met Your Mother were two iconic sitcoms that each featured an ensemble cast and focused on the sordid love lives of their characters. Whereas How I Met Your Mother, which debuted in September of 2005, had a specific gimmick, The Golden Girls, which debuted in September of 1985, was a much more standard-issue sitcom, and would regularly shift focus between characters, often in the same episode, foregoing any kind of long-term storyline and playing first to a quick punchline or visual gag.
Though The Golden Girls continues to resonate, from greeting cards to fanmade Lego sets, it’s the kind of show everyone knows, even if not everyone could actually remember the plot of an episode. Where The Golden Girls, first debuting three decades ago, feels slightly dated, How I Met Your Mother depended entirely on a series-long storyline, complete with a detached narrator (an uncredited Bob Saget) serving as the “future self” of the main character, and everything had to lead up to what its title promised.
Here we look at the two shows’ pilot episodes to see how well each of them hold up today.
The Theme Song
With the 13 second excerpt from The Solids’ “Hey Beautiful” serving as the theme to How I Met Your Mother, it serves as a pleasant musical backdrop to the makeshift photo collage of the characters hanging out at MacLaren’s Bar and having a nice, candid time. It gives no real insight into the show’s framing device, but doesn’t necessarily have to. For casual viewers, it’s still a show about five friends who occasionally shift their relationships around.
The Golden Girls theme, however, has had 30 years to become a cultural staple, the kind of song everyone at the bar would know if it were to come on the jukebox (also, is there a bar that has a jukebox with nothing but TV theme songs?). Originally released by Andrew Gold for his 1978 album All This And Heaven Too, before being re-recorded by Cynthia Fee for the show seven years later, it’s an anthemic ode to the friendship and camaraderie that these four characters find in themselves at a later chapter in their lives.
The Premise
The Golden Girls was relatively straightforward, plot-wise, focusing on three middle-aged widows sharing a house in Miami, while one’s elderly mother comes to live with them, it was their contrasting personalities and differing outlooks on life become the show’s driving aspect. Though the idea of an all-female ensemble cast was an unusual risk to take in 1985, when the nuclear families of The Cosby Show and Family Ties reigned supreme. It paid off, and The Golden Girls stayed in the top 10 through six of its seven seasons.
How I Met Your Mother, on the surface, has a similar approach, if you replace the middle-aged widows with a mixed group of five friends, and Miami with New York City. Although there’s a larger story being built upon, the pilot episode bookends with Ted’s conversation with his two children. While seeming like a standard issue sitcom on the surface, it employs a flashback briefly in the pilot, an indicator of the show’s occasionally subversive nature, which would later become a central aspect of its storytelling.
The Characters
Of the four main characters of The Golden Girls, each had a clearly defined role played by an actress who was already well-established. There was Dorothy, the leader and utter cynic, played by Bea Arthur, a teacher who seemed to have a lot in common with archetypes like Archie Bunker. Rue McLanahan played Blanche, the free spirited southern belle with an active love life. Betty White (before she conquered the internet) played Rose, the earnest, if not absent-minded Rose. Finally, Estelle Getty played Sophia, Dorothy’s mother, a woman who dealt the cantankerous punchlines.
It’s also worth noting that the pilot episode also had Coco, played by Charles Levin, the gay live-in cook. He was dropped after that first episode and most of his one-liners went to Sophia as a result.
How I Met Your Mother relied on relative unknowns for the bulk of its cast. Starting with Ted, a kind of everyman played by Josh Radnor, was the show’s driving force. His best friend, Marshall, played by Jason Segal, had just proposed to his girlfriend Lily, Alyson Hannigan, and the two played off each other perfectly as the goofy, earnest couple in love. Barney, Neil Patrick Harris at the dawn of his comeback, played Barney, the one-note womanizer with a perpetual catchphrase. Rounding it out was Robin, played by Colbie Smulders, an ambitious journalist who Ted falls for immediately upon seeing her, and is an integral part of the bait-and-switch in its closing moments.
The Humor
While The Golden Girls defied sitcom conventions by having four older female leads, all established actresses in their own right, the humor was surprisingly brash. Dorothy’s opening dialogue with Coco concerned how she, a teacher, sent home three girls with shaved heads and two boys with green hair because they were “too ugly.” Sophia refers to Coco as “The Fancy Man,” whereas Rose gets a laugh-track punchline hoping Blanche’s beau, Harry, doesn’t have hair in his ears.
Ted, however, is a bumbling would-be romantic who, after meeting Robin, blurts out “I love you” to her (more than once), effectively landing his foot in his mouth. Marshall and Lily, freshly engaged and completely in love, rely on off-screen slapstick stemming from Marshall’s inability to open a bottle of champagne properly. Most of the punchlines come from Barney, whose pushy behavior serves as his attempt to redefine Ted’s love-life through catchphrases like “suit up!”
The Golden Girls had a definite mean-streak, aiming for a “I can’t believe she said THAT” kind of humor. How I Met Your Mother aimed to create likable characters the audience could root for, even Barney as a kind of self-aware jerk that we all know.
The Ending
While The Golden Girls‘ pilot episode took plenty of time for snarky one-liners, the story involved Blanche considering a marriage proposal from Harry, a man she’d met just a week earlier, “at our age we don’t have time for long engagements.” Completely smitten with him, it leaves the other three questioning where they’ll live, given that it’s Blanche’s house they all share. In the final scene, a policeman arrives at the door to inform them that Harry had been arrested as a bigamist and con-artist. The show uses the abrupt delivery of the news to reinforce the fact that these four women are family, and will remain so throughout the coming seven seasons.
As mentioned earlier, How I Met Your Mother pulls a significant bait-and-switch in its closing moments. As Ted, who’d misread Robin’s signals, seemed to position himself as one-half of a “will they or won’t they” (or in this case, “When will they?”) dynamic, the story flashes forward to “present day” Ted (at this point an undetermined point in the future), whose narration serves to explain to his kids that was the moment he met their Aunt Robin, which causes them to roll their eyes. A moment that ultimately set itself up for one of the most divisive and widely-discussed finales in recent years.
The Verdict
Keep in mind that the question was, “which pilot episode holds up better,” not which show was better. So, while The Golden Girls‘ ode to lifelong friendship through thick and thin has a timelessness to it, in the end How I Met Your Mother doesn’t let its own gimmick stop short of creating a dynamic group of characters that are easy to identify with.