Why The Golden Girls Only Had Three Chairs Around Their Table
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The characters in "The Golden Girls" have been our friends for decades. The comedic show premiered in 1985, and though it only ran for seven seasons, syndication has kept it in heavy rotation on TVs ever since then. Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty, and Betty White starred in the show and delivered laughs, tears, and some of the most memorable dialogue ever heard on TV. These four single women of a certain age in Miami lit up the small screen in a way that few have done since then.
What was always so interesting about the show was the limited sets production worked with. Nearly everything took place inside the home the four women shared, largely in the living room and kitchen. The kitchen was where they shared late-night cheesecakes and gossiped about men. But have you ever noticed that the kitchen table only has three chairs around it? Though the table changed a bit at the beginning of the show, while the set designers were ironing out how everything should look, once the table with three chairs was put in place, it stayed that way until the end. But why just three chairs for four women? The answer is simple.
There were only three chairs for the sake of blocking
Picture it: Four chairs around a table with four women in them and one has their back to the camera. That won't work, will it? This is the primary reason there are only ever three chairs around the table and not four. In the book "Golden Girls Forever: An Unauthorized Look Behind the Lanai," assistant art director John Shaffner said that production made a conscious decision to keep the fourth woman always up doing something else, whether it was cooking at the stove or standing at the island. This way the show felt more like a play with movement.
All of this is part of blocking a scene, which means setting it up for the cameras. Blocking involves every piece of the set and cast, so the director will block out where they want each person appearing in the scene and where everything in the set should be so that the focus is in the right place. To put four chairs around the table, the actors would have to be too close together or have a back to the camera, neither of which option really worked for "The Golden Girls." With someone always up doing something else, the scene feels less stagnant than if they were all sitting.
Makes perfect sense, right?