Everyone Loves 'The Golden Girls,' So Why Can't We Stream It Anywhere?

We live in a magical time, when thousands of new and old TV shows are available at the click of a button, thanks to streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. But not every show has made the transition. In Stream This! we highlight a deserving series that’s not yet available on streaming… but should be.

Picture it: Your couch, 2015. You can flip on your TV and dial up all 180 episodes of The Golden Girls as easily as you can pull an emergency cheesecake out of the fridge.

A beautiful fantasy, right? Unfortunately, it’s still just a fantasy at this point. Despite three decades of enduring popularity, the classic NBC sitcom still isn’t available on any streaming service. And we’re trying to figure out why.

Sure, you can catch Golden Girls reruns every night all over the TV grid, from Hallmark Channel to TV Land to Logo. But you could say that about Seinfeld and Friends, too, and those are available on streaming. What if we want to see Dorothy, Rose, and Blanche one-up each other in an all-night dance marathon right now? This show is too great, too essential to be left out of the streaming game much longer.

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Debuting back in 1985, The Golden Girls was a radical concept that seems even more radical now: Launch a sitcom — on Saturday nights, mind you! — revolving around four women, all over the age of 50. (It helped that all four women were funny as hell.) But the gamble paid off: Girls was an instant top-10 ratings hit, running for seven seasons and earning each of its four main actresses an Emmy award.

The premise was simple: Four ladies on the far end of middle age share a Miami house — along with a hundred or so late-night cheesecakes. But the genius was in the perfectly balanced comedy team the ladies formed: sarcastic cynic Dorothy (Bea Arthur, queen of the reaction shot); vivacious floozy Blanche (Rue McClanahan); dopey naïf Rose (Betty White); and foul-mouthed granny Sophia (Estelle Getty).

All four actresses were at the top of their game, and bounced off each other in hilarious fashion. Dorothy rolls her eyes at a stupid comment from Rose. Sophia calls Blanche a slut. Dorothy threatens to ship Sophia off to Shady Pines. The internal dynamics were comfortingly predictable… and punched up by some of the best sitcom writers of the 1980s. (Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry and Arrested Development creator Mitchell Hurwitz both spent time on the Golden Girls writing staff.)

Granted, there are a few things about the show that didn’t age well — and not just the '80s Miami fashions. It did veer into maudlin very-special-episode territory (Blanche’s brother is gay! Rose might have AIDS!) on occasion. But even with the standard sitcom laugh track cranked up to full volume, the timeless one-liners still shine through… and the warm affection between the four ladies, even amid all the insults they toss each other’s way, never dims for a second.

Related: The Ultimate ‘Seinfeld’ 24-Hour Marathon

Now, two-plus decades after the show went off the air in 1992, the Girls are still as popular as ever; just look at the massive blocks of reruns Hallmark and others air seemingly on a loop. New generations who weren’t even alive when the show originally aired are discovering how great The Golden Girls are every day. So why hasn’t a streaming service snapped it up yet?

You actually can stream the series on Amazon, but you’ll have to pay $1.99 for each episode. Or you could shell out for the full seven-season DVD set, we suppose, but that comes with a hefty price tag: as much as $549 (!). And who wants to deal with discs anymore, anyway? Also, the reruns we see in syndication are edited for time, so jokes and even entire scenes are missing from the current Golden Girls experience.

We reached out to ABC Studios, which owns the syndication rights to Golden Girls, to see if there are any plans to offer the show on streaming, but they didn’t respond to our request. So we’ll have to assume we’re stuck watching reruns for now… and we’ll dream of a time when we can be lulled to sleep by one of Rose’s pointless St. Olaf stories anytime we want.