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High Anxiety was the twentieth episode of the fourth season of The Golden Girls and the ninety-sixth episode overall. Directed by Terry Hughes and written by Robert Bruce and Martin Weiss, it premiered on NBC-TV on March 25th, 1989.
Summary[]
After Sophia accidentally knocks a bottle of Rose's pills down the sink, the ladies learn that Rose is addicted to painkillers. Meanwhile, Dorothy and Sophia are hired to be in a pizza commercial.
Plot[]
Sophia announces to the ladies that while shopping at the local mini-mall, she found a newly-opened pizza chain and its owner asked Sophia to be in a commercial for them. Dorothy is skeptical at the production, and Blanche expresses disdain that they want to use her kitchen as the setting for the commercial. Meanwhile, Rose asks if anyone has seen her medication, to which the ladies discover that Sophia had accidentally knocked them into the sink earlier. Being late in the evening and the next day a holiday, Rose has to go without her medication for at least a day.
The next day, the director for the commercial, Sy Ferber, arrives at the house to discuss the commercial with Sophia. He eventually recruits Dorothy to be included in the commercial, and placates Blanche to use their kitchen by offering $1000 per day for the location. As they head into the kitchen to begin planning, they find an irritable and angry Rose baking a cake. She becomes hostile towards Sy for being in the kitchen and scares him away, causing Sy to call the commercial off. As the ladies ask why Rose is acting this way, she yells at them to get off her back and storms out.
The next morning, Sophia announces she is attending acting lessons, to the surprise of Dorothy and Blanche. Assuming Sophia wasn't going to be in the commercial any longer, they learn that Sophia has convinced the director to reconsider, but will not be shooting it in their kitchen as he's terrified of Rose. As Sophia heads out, Dorothy and Blanche discover Rose to be in her normal, chipper mood. They confront her about the difference in attitude from yesterday, and Rose assures that despite being "on edge," she would never be like that again. Dorothy and Blanche then notice Rose has her medication in hand, and questions her about them. It turns out Rose had been taking the same painkiller prescription from a doctor for a back injury she sustained nearly thirty years ago, and had never stopped. They suggest Rose has become dependent on her painkillers, which Rose takes offense for assuming she is being compared to a drug addict. She tersely hands over her medication to Dorothy and Blanche, insisting she can prove she is not dependent on them.
Late into the night, Dorothy, Blanche, and Sophia are awakened by Rose accidentally breaking something in the kitchen. Rose says she is simply cleaning the kitchen, but the others discover she had found her medication they had hidden from her. They insist that Rose needs professional help and to take herself to rehab, but Rose denies it, saying she would feel ashamed and embarrassed, and claims she can quit by her own will. Rose asks the rest of the ladies to help keep her mind off of taking her medication for the rest the night to prove that she can do it, and they agree. They stay up through the night playing board games and telling stories to each other. As day breaks and they celebrate Rose making it through the night, Rose happily states that if she can't make it through more nights, she would need their help like this all over again, much to their chagrin.
Sophia and Dorothy are later at a film studio shooting for the pizza chain's commercial. As they rehearse their lines, Dorothy draws the ire of Sy with her unenthusiastic performance and her insistence on making the script grammatically correct. He decides to have Dorothy play the pizza server and the woman playing the pizza server plays Sophia's daughter. The commercial is able to proceed as planned until Sophia takes a bite of the pizza. She exclaims that she is offended by the pizza's quality and refuses to lie about the quality of the pizza's taste, so she and Dorothy walk out of the studio.
Back at home, Dorothy mistakenly assumes Rose is relapsing and taking her medication, but the "medication" turns out to be a Flintstones vitamin. However, Rose admits that Dorothy is not wholly wrong, as she actually did relapse the night before and took one of her painkillers. She explains to a shocked Dorothy that she is finally realizing her dependence is stronger than even the support of her friends. When Dorothy offers to call a rehab center for Rose once again, she stops Dorothy, saying that she herself is the one that needs to make the call.
A month later, Rose is slated to return from rehab. The ladies are excited to have Rose back, but Blanche worries that Rose might not be her same self. As Rose walks in, everyone is elated to greet her, and Blanche states that she is glad Rose is "cured." Rose, however, corrects Blanche by saying that she will never be "cured", but that she has learned she can live the rest of her life without her medication one day at a time. Rose then continues to drone on with anecdotes and tangents, showing she is still the same person as ever.[1]
Tall Tales[]
Back in St. Olaf...[]
When asked why she takes painkillers, Rose tells the ladies that they were prescribed to her after she sustained a farming-related injury in St. Olaf. After Bessie threw her back out pulling the plow, Rose stepped up to do the work for her. When Dorothy asks why they didn't just get another cow, Rose exclaims that Bessie wasn't a cow -- she was an old fat lady who pulled plows for a living.
Cast[]
Main Cast[]
- Bea Arthur as Dorothy Zbornak
- Rue McClanahan as Blanche Devereaux
- Betty White as Rose Nylund
- Estelle Getty as Sophia Petrillo
Guest Stars[]
- Jay Thomas as Sy Ferber
- Nancy Black as Heather
Trivia[]
Production[]
- According to Golden Girls Forever, Jay Thomas says that during rehearsal of one of the pizzeria scenes with Bea and Estelle, he transposed two words by accident, which ended up getting a laugh. Estelle Getty came over to him later and said Bea didn't like ad libs, but since it'd gotten a laugh in rehearsal, he did the same thing on tape night. Bea Arthur was not happy with it then either.
- This episode and the episode "All Bets Are Off" end on similar lines.[2] Rose in "All Bets Are Off" and Blanche in "High Anxiety" remark that Dorothy and Rose, respectively, are now cured. Then Dorothy and Rose both state that they aren't cured and that they will never be and instead that they learn to take each day at a time and live without their respective addictions.
Cultural references[]
- After being berated by Rose, Sy says that if he wanted to be abused, he'd be directing "The Roseanne Barr Show". Roseanne was a sitcom on ABC that ran from 1988 to 1997 (with a brief revival in 2018) that centered around Roseanne Barr portraying a working-class mother in Illinois. Though it received acclaim for its realistic portrayal of a working family, lead actress Roseanne Barr was rumored to be demeaning and aggressive towards production staff. Most notably, it was revealed in 1993 that Barr referred to the show's nineteen writers by a number rather than their names, and the writers would wear shirts with their assigned numbers.
Goofs[]
- Sophia mentions that she never breastfed Dorothy. But in an earlier episode, she mentioned that she breastfed Dorothy for the first two years of her life.
- Rose mentions it being the anniversary of her beloved cat Fluffy's passing, in to which Dorothy responds by reminding Rose that she's allergic to cats and never had one. However, in "The Way We Met", it's revealed that Rose has a cat named Mr. Peepers. Her current landlord would not allow Rose to keep Mr. Peepers, so she reluctantly gives him up to a little boy she meets at the market. The little boy's cat had just died, and Rose felt he would give Mr. Peepers a good home.[3]
- When Rose was putting her new prescription for the pills in the cabinet, it was a big round bottle. Later that night when the Blanche, Sophia and Dorothy come into the kitchen to see what she's doing, Rose has a small pill bottle in her hand.
- Rose puts her pill bottle in a cabinet next to the sink in the kitchen. In the next scene, she takes the bottle out of a cabinet next to the stove.
- While the girls are staying up all night and talking in the kitchen, it switches from dark to light outside within seconds. In actuality it would take closer to an hour.
[]
References[]
- ↑ The Golden Girls, Season 4, Episode 20, “High Anxiety”. Weiss, Martin and Bruce, Robert (writers) & Hughes, Terry (director) (March 25th, 1989)
- ↑ The Golden Girls, Season 5, Episode 24, "All Bets Are Off". Stein, Eugene B. (writer) and Hughes, Terry (director) (April 28th, 1990)
- ↑ The Golden Girls, Season 1, Episode 25, "The Way We Met". Speer, Kathy and Grossman, Terry (writers) & Hughes, Terry (director) (May 10th, 1986)