Hulu Restores “Golden Girls” Controversial Episode as Social Justice Fades

After the death of George Floyd in 2020, media companies were doing anything they could to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Multimillion dollar donations were handed over to the cause. ViacomCBS and it’s collection of channels aired a 9 minute black screen with a timer and the text “I can’t breathe”, accompanied by the sound of inhalation and exhalation. There was some controversy when children’s network Nickelodeon decided to run the same programming in addition to their original more kid-friendly version. Public and private Instagram accounts posted black squares in solidarity with the movement.

People began to comb over episodes of older media for past transgressions that might have been forgotten. I can assure you that they didn’t catch them all.

Disney added content warnings to some of their older animated films. They moved Peter Pan, Dumbo, and The Jungle Book to the adults only sections of the service. HBOMax pulled Gone With the Wind off of streaming entirely. Tina Fey issued a public statement that several episodes of 30 Rock featuring blackface would be pulled from distribution, stating that “intent is not an excuse.” Netflix UK banned five episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia for the same reason even though some of the content in question had premiered in September of the previous year. Hulu eventually pulled those same episodes in America as well.

Caught up in the wave of “we must doing SOMETHING,” Hulu also pulled a 1988 episode of Golden Girls titled “Mixed Blessings” in which Rose and Blanche emerge from the kitchen wearing mud masks, only to have their African-American visitors react in shock before Betty White perfectly delivers the line “this is mud on our faces! We’re not REALLY black!”

Most of the reaction online was that pulling the episode was not really doing much to advance the cause of racial justice or ending systemic racism, but the episode was banned regardless.

HBOMax restored Gone With The Wind with a special introduction discussing the issues at hand. The episodes of 30 Rock and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia are still not available on subscription streamers. There were reports that later in 2020 Hulu restored a single episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but whether or not that’s true it’s not available today.

I originally thought that I would need to purchase an out-of-print DVD to see for myself what all the fuss was about. That turned out to not be necessary because all of the episodes in question are easily available for purchase digitally on services like Google Play. It would appear that the episodes are only harmful to America if they are available at no extra charge.

But what about the Golden Girls? What’s interesting is that sometime between 2020 and today the episode of Golden Girls was quietly restored to Hulu. You can see it yourself today if you have a subscription. Just open up Hulu and go to Season 3, Episode 23, “Mixed Blessings” at right around the 13 and a half minute mark.

So what does this mean? Does this mean that Hulu eventually agreed that pulling the episode did nothing for racial justice? Did the desire for more content to feed the machine just win out? Or did they decide that we had finally reached a point in America where race is no longer an issue?