It's good, funny and worth watching even today. Progressive and good hearted on a lot of important points, as compared to the awful trash ideals of a lot of other sitcoms. Yikes on some stuff, of course (some super cringe ideas about the global south and socialism).

all sitcoms suck

that being said, a minor anecdote from one of the people who worked on the show:

PETER D. BEYT (editor): It was while I was working on The Golden Girls when we found out my partner, Dean, was HIV positive. Estelle Getty was the first person I told. Her nephew was HIV positive, so she and I now had a connection. This was a new, scary world we both had to face. News stories would show the hospital room no one would go into, except in full hazmat suits. For six months, a family member — who works in infectious diseases — wouldn’t let me go near his children, because they didn’t yet know how HIV spread. It was a lot to go through. And when I would get to work, and be carrying all this baggage, Rue and Betty and Estelle, and occasionally Bea, were friends I could talk to.

Later on, I would start directing Golden Girls episodes. But when I was an editor, I would sit with the footage every Monday after tape night, and of course watch everything very closely and carefully. And I often felt like the episodes were really relevant to my life. In “Old Boyfriends,” Dorothy has a moment where she tells the dying woman, Sarah, “The only time you’re wasting is the time you and Marvin should be spending together.” That really hit home with me, and was one of the things that inspired me to take a year off to care for Dean. In a later episode, “Home Again, Rose,” which I directed, the Girls can’t get in to see Rose after her heart attack because they’re not immediate family; well, I’d just had the same experience with Dean, after he’d had a seizure in a restaurant.

But it was really “72 Hours” that for me showed what TV can do, and how far a sitcom can reach. I hadn’t gone to the taping of the episode, but I was set to edit it. I hadn’t read the script, and I had no idea what it was about, or what was coming. This was in early 1990, a time when there was still so much shame about the disease. Having grown up in Louisiana, I already was feeling shame about being gay. My partner was dying, and now I was ashamed about that, too, and feeling on some level like I deserved this.

So here I was, editing away, watching the episode for the first time. And I got to the point where there’s an argument between Rose and Blanche. I looked up at the screen in time for Blanche to say, “AIDS is not a bad person’s disease, Rose. It is not God punishing people for their sins!”

My heart stopped. All of a sudden, unexpectedly, here was this woman on a sitcom I was cutting, talking about what I was feeling. I always admired Rue as a star and a friend anyway, but now a character I’d come to know so well was saying what I needed to hear. I broke down, of course. I had to stop working. And then I pulled myself together — and from that point, right in the middle of my partner’s battle, I no longer thought I was a bad person. The show changed me in that moment of desperation. And my God, did the world ever need that to be said!

Yes.

Golden Palace the sequel wasn't as good.

Probably not good enough to justify a convention. Golden girls is basically a meme at this point.