Here's more from other publications:

"When she auditioned, Getty was appearing in Hollywood as the carping Jewish mother in Harvey Fierstein's 'Torch Song Trilogy.' In her early 60s, she flunked her Golden Girls test twice because she didn't look old enough. "I could understand that," she told an interviewer a year after the show debuted. "I walk fast, I move fast, I talk fast." She came prepared for the third audition, wearing dowdy clothes and telling the makeup artist, "To you this is just a job. To me it's my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80." The artist did, Getty got the job and won two Emmys" [Associated Press obit]

“I’ve played mothers to heroes and mothers to zeroes,” Ms. Getty wrote in her autobiography, “If I Knew Then What I Know Now ... So What?” (Contemporary Books, 1988). “I’ve played Irish mothers, Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, Southern mothers, mothers in plays by Neil Simon and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. I’ve played mother to everyone but Attila the Hun.” [New York Times obit]

Dorothy (Sophia’s daughter, played by Beatrice Arthur): Hi, Ma. Where are you going?
Sophia: To the boardwalk. I like to watch the old guys rearrange themselves when they come out of the water.
Blanche (Rue McClanahan): I treat my body like a temple.
Sophia: Yeah, open to everyone, day or night.
[The Kansas City Star's favorite Sophia quotes]

Despite the laughs, early tapings were stressful: White and Arthur had recently lost their mothers, and Getty was beginning to forget her lines — an annoyance that exacerbated her already feisty nature.
BEA ARTHUR: Right from the beginning, Estelle had problems. We would have to give her cue cards.
SUSAN WHITE: She was in trouble. She would write lines on the salt and pepper shakers so she could remember them.
RUE MCCLANAHAN: Estelle was never happy. Something panicked her. By Friday nights, she was a nervous wreck.
[From Entertainment Weekly's 20th Anniversary honor of Golden Girls]

“The thing that concerns us is that they talk about the show in terms of it being a women’s show,” said Tom Fitzgerald, 41, one-half of the blogging team behind the popular Project Rungay blog, which obsessively chronicles every episode as well as any and all behind-the-scenes gossip. “And we’re living proof that that’s not entirely the case. It has a very large gay viewership. It has a very large straight viewership that likes the fact that it’s an urban, intelligent, creative reality show. Our hope is that they don’t forget that.”

“Lifetime is about as hip as Massengill,” wrote one commenter on Gothamist.

“I always knew the Lifetime channel was a homewrecking slut pretending to be a middle-aged virgin,” wrote the Dlisted blog. A commenter responded, “Being on Lifetime will place PR in a context that automatically makes it not cool, trendy, or creative. Bravo is funny and gay. Lifetime is timid and stodgy. It’s not a good match. How are they going to edit all the snarky comments by the contestant Queens? I hope they don’t edit it to be too bland and acceptable.”

And on Project Rungay, Mr. Fitzgerald and his co-blogger, Lorenzo Marquez, wrote: “We just don’t know. One of the many reasons we love the show is because it was on Bravo, the most gay-friendly cable network around. While Lifetime certainly isn’t UNfriendly to the gays, we can’t help but fear for our baby.”

Do they really have anything to fear?

In January, Lifetime launched a reality show called How to Look Good Naked, hosted by Carson Kressley, the very gay ex-cohost of the show that helped rebrand Bravo five years ago, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Mr. Kressley’s show is an Oprah-fied version of Extreme Makeover (if Oprah were male and blond and gay), featuring rather overweight, depressed women with negative amounts of self-confidence who, thanks to Mr. Kressley’s relentless cheerleading and a haircut, become the women they were meant to be.

By hiring Mr. Kressley, who was practically a Bravo mascot thanks to his Queer Eye stint, it’s as if Lifetime dipped a toe into the gay waters before dunking itself all the way in; Mr. Kressley’s show has been renewed for a second season. And the show has managed to find an original spin on the tired makeover genre, even if that spin involves women parading about, often in public, in their underwear and bra, and then participating in a nude photo shoot. It’s almost train-wrecky, but just goofy enough that it manages to be endearing, especially since Mr. Kressley has fully embraced his new role as savior of the overweight and under-styled. Indeed, he doesn’t just get his subjects a new wardrobe, but he makes them feel fabulous! From the inside! Self-help never looked so good!

“We do internal makeovers before the external makeovers,” said Riaz Patel, the 34-year-old producer of Naked. “We don’t even touch hair and makeup until halfway through the show! The scope and impact of the changes are tremendous. The women from cycle one have completely transformed their lives.” Mr. Patel went on to say that he speaks with several of the contestants at least once a week, discussing everything from their new dating lives (which are fabulous!) to the possibility of returning for a where-are-they-now episode (very likely!). “We’re not building them a new house. We’re building them a new sense of self.”

Indeed, perhaps the biggest difference between Mr. Kressley’s makeover show and that of, say, Project Runway co-host Tim Gunn, is the giddy enthusiasm Mr. Kressley has for his endeavor. There is none of the eye-rolling of Mr. Gunn’s makeover show on Bravo, Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style, in which he and his co-host, Veronica Webb, make fun of their subjects and their awful wardrobes/haircuts behind their backs, even as they do make them undeniably more attractive in the end. But it’s funny, ironic, hip. Comparatively, Lifetime’s untrammeled earnestness—eagerness, even—comes off as distinctly uncool. And tucked within online commenters’ anxieties about whether Lifetime would keep Project Runway gay was the fear that Lifetime, in its implied anti-irony stance, would, therefore, be resistant to kitsch and camp and sarcasm, and perhaps leave on the cutting-room floor the bitchy asides that the PR contestants make.

Certainly, earnestness does abound at Lifetime. There’s the somewhat shmaltzy, but also somewhat addictive, prime-time soap opera Army Wives, whose convoluted plot twists, affairs and secret pregnancies make Desperate Housewives look like The Cosby Show. But the network has managed to replace its formerly interchangeable, and wholly forgettable, slate of made-for-TV movies with fare that’s based on trade-fiction women’s-book-group staples, like the very successful broadcast of Kim Edwards’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. Significantly, that film starred what might be Lifetime’s most high-profile roster to date: Emily Watson, Dermot Mulroney and Gretchen Mol.

“I really liked the way that the programming was heading and the quality of the projects they were doing,” said the actress Kelly Preston, who stars in an adaptation of a Jodi Picault novel, The Tenth Circle, this June on Lifetime. (Still, it’s not as if Lifetime has completely thrown off the melodramatic mantle of the past; as Ms. Preston put it, The Tenth Circle is about “a child getting raped at a party, but also about how the mother is having an affair with one of her students.”)

The programming at Lifetime has undeniably been changing over the past few years, largely thanks to the efforts of Susanne Daniels, who was named president of entertainment at Lifetime in August 2005, and Andrea Wong, who was named president and CEO of Lifetime in April 2007.

“I think five years ago, the Lifetime audience had shrunk, and down to a narrow core that was less affluent, with more free time on their hands,” said Ms. Daniels. “They were the kind of people who would watch our movies back-to-back. That was the only kind of viewer we had.” Today, there’s something a little Tracy Flick-ish about Lifetime; several executives gave me the same talking points about how Lifetime is in more households than Bravo, has more viewers with four-plus years of college education, and has a higher female viewership. (Uh, we get it!) “We’re working toward making the brand cool, one way or another,” said Ms. Daniels.

The question, then, is whether this new formula—higher-quality movies, original programming (à la Army Wives) and reality television (Lifetime was quick to announce the development of two spinoffs of Project Runway) will work. If Lifetime keeps moving in the direction it’s headed, then its chances
seem good. But the question of whether the gay audience will keep watching is a tricky one.

“We would love for them to watch [Project Runway] on Lifetime, too!” said Meredith Wagner, Lifetime’s executive vice president of public affairs and corporate communications. “Our door is open. As I said, we’re inclusive. And we want them. We hope they’ll come! The show’s not going to change.” That being said, it’s hard not to feel like gay men are being treated like fag hags—they’re an accessory in the new Lifetime, around for camp value and being able to tell you if your butt looks big, but with no programming revolving around them.

“We really love women,” said Ms. Wagner. “And we care about women. We put them first.”

On Saturday morning, Lifetime Television convened a meeting of local women. At the end of a program of speakers that included Martha Burk (of Augusta National Golf Club protests fame), who is currently serving as Bill Richardson's senior adviser for women's issues, the
audience took part in a straw poll.

Though the results for actual candidates were all over the map and were therefore not released--Lifetime wanted to stress that they did not consider this a terribly scientific poll--they did tell me that a full 50 percent of the 100 or so women present declared themselves undecided.

In the audience was Laura Fink, 31, of Londonderry, NH. "First I was Hillary, then I said I don't like her stance on some things. Then I met Obama. He reminds me of Howard Dean: young, fresh. I hope the media doesn't do the same thing to him," she said.

Her meeting with Obama was back in early September, and she's still committed to him--she had been canvassing for him that week. "He's very friendly. There's a toughness about Hillary, but he's so gentle. And he has a heart," she said. "We want someone to listen to us."

Are image and perception actually as important as political consultants would like candidates to think they are?

At a table in the center of the room was Leslie Sanderson, of the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Nashua, with a teen director of the center and four young charges, two of whom are 17 but will be 18 for the general election, and two of whom were just a bit too young to vote this year.

"I'd say the woman has stronger qualifications than the other candidate," said Sanderson. "But people say Hillary can't win."

But why?

"I think it has a lot to do with President Clinton," she said. (She would not reveal who she intended to vote for; she did say that her husband claimed that Clinton was not "electable.") "Look, she handled her husband's affair... You can argue about that: she should have dumped him, she should have killed him--but she got through it."

"Especially since it's supposed to be the love of your life!" said Rocio, 16. "That's not supposed to be acceptable."

"My science teacher said just about every president cheated on his wife, " said Cynthia, 17.

These women were seven or eight years old during the Monica Lewinsky hubbub--it's somewhat remarkable that it registers at all, and that Monica still carries an emotional weight.

In the Iowa caucuses, young women voters showed no particular loyalty to Hillary Clinton, who is, on the face of things, a woman. A Lifetime/Zogby poll conducted last month said that New Hampshire women voters strongly favored Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama, 39-25--but that one in four women voters sampled would switch if their candidate didn't win in Iowa.

There were women who were even younger at the Lifetime event, but I did not ask them about Monica. What did Emma and Rachel, both 9 years old, think of the candidates?

"Hillary Clinton wants health care," said Emma. Like almost everyone in the state, they'd met candidates. What else stuck in their minds about the campaigners?

"That's all I know," said Rachel. They were feeling really shy.

What did John Edwards want?

"I don't know!" said Emma.

And what issues would influence their vote? (They will be participating in a kids' voting project.)

"To stop animal testing," said Emma.

"To stop littering," Rachel said, very serious.

"Good education," said Emma.

"Clothes to the needy," said Rachel.

That was pretty much it for them--but the 9-year-olds were clearly issues voters, with not a word to say about image or publicity-craft.