Sam, the hero of the new Netflix show “The Boroughs,” doesn’t want to move to a retirement community. When a gate attendant welcomes him to the Boroughs, “where you’ll have the time of your life,” Sam (Alfred Molina), a former engineer, only sneers. “Ironic slogan for a place where people come to die,” he says.
Like Sam, television doesn’t generally want to hang around old people either — not unless they’re offering comic relief or sage advice to younger, more prominent characters. While the 1980s saw a number of mainstream shows centered on older characters, like “The Golden Girls,” “Murder She Wrote” and “Matlock,” these were outliers. By the mid 1990s, they were nearly all gone, and in the decades since few shows seemed interested in depicting the elderly with any complexity, if they depicted them at all.
In 2016, the celebrated writer and producer Norman Lear, then in his 90s, lamented in The Times and elsewhere that he couldn’t get anyone to greenlight a sitcom set in a retirement community. The following year a study found that fewer than 10 percent of speaking roles on American network television were assigned to characters over the age of 60, though those over 60 made up about 20 percent of the population at the time. The study also noted that when elderly characters — typically white, male and able-bodied — were included, they were often the targets of ageist language.
But everything old is new again, or at least rendered with more sympathy and complication. “The Boroughs,” which debuts on Thursday, features a starry cast — Molina, Geena Davis, Clarke Peters, Bill Pullman, Alfre Woodard — mostly in their 70s. It joins other current shows like “A Man on the Inside,” “Only Murders in the Building,” “Hacks,” “Happy’s Place,” “Slow Horses,” “Shrinking,” “The Gilded Age,” the “Matlock” reboot, Ryan Murphy dramas and much of the Taylor Sheridan universe in ceding the high-definition screen to the elderly.
If the hair is grayer, the skin less elastic and the hips not perhaps always original, these characters lead lives of mess and intrigue, complication and delight, just like their younger counterparts. Has TV entered its golden era?
Woodard, 73, a star of “The Boroughs,” hopes so. “I’d like my work to be an adventure from now on,” she said in a phone interview.
Historically, older actors have orbited a handful of character tropes — wisecracking, grouchy, confused, comically sexual. “The Golden Girls,” which debuted in 1985, leaned in to all of these qualities, though the acting and the writing transcends them.
The Girls — played by Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty — were women in full, and they proved popular with all kinds of viewers. (This remains so. The show is a staple of the queer-focused cable network Logo and is beloved by millennial and Gen X viewers.)
“It was great actors, great scripts and certainly one of the comedies that motivated me to try and do this,” said the writer and creator Chuck Lorre (“The Big Bang Theory,” “Two and a Half Men”). The script he wrote to break into the business was a “Golden Girls” spec.
But by the early 1990s “The Golden Girls” had foundered, as had its spinoff “The Golden Palace.” A few years later, “Matlock,” “Murder, She Wrote” and a “Golden Girls” sister show, “Empty Nest,” were gone, too. (“Diagnosis Murder,” starring the now centenarian Dick Van Dyke, hung on until 2001.)
“The Golden Girls” template endured. But it got aged down to “Designing Women” to “Sex and the City” to “Girls,” notes Alfred L. Martin Jr., a media professor and the co-editor of “The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai.”
“We still are haunted by ‘The Golden Girls,’” he said. “It is just that the series got younger.”
There have been occasional senior-focused British imports (“Last Tango in Halifax”) or shows set in facilities for the elderly that centered on younger workers (“Getting On,” “Derek”). But TV mostly left older characters on the margins.
Why did networks turn away from shows about older adults? Well, they had never turned toward them in any great number. Networks depend on advertising, and advertisers have typically seen the 18-49 and 25-54 cohorts as the most desirable demographics.
“They prize younger viewers,” said Lorre, who spent most of his career in network television. Industry wisdom insists that younger viewers demand younger heroes.
The writer and creator Michael Schur (“The Good Place”), who fell in love with “The Golden Girls” as an 11-year-old — “At the time I didn’t understand that it was weird,” he said — suggested another reason.
“Aging is seen as something shameful or to be resisted at all costs,” he said. “I think it’s that mortality is scary, and aging is related to mortality.”
The industry seems to feel that fear, unconsciously or otherwise. Stacy L. Smith, an author of that 2017 study and the founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, said her research indicates television has an implicit bias toward youth and tends to erase or denigrate older characters.
But about a decade ago, streaming services, which rely less on ad dollars than on sheer numbers of subscribers, began to make senior characters more visible.
“If we’re trying to speak to everybody, then we have to really put our money where our mouths are, regardless of your age,” said Jinny Howe, the head of scripted series for Netflix. “You have to feel like you’re coming here, and there is something directly speaking to you and for you.”
In 2015 Netflix premiered “Grace and Frankie,” a buddy comedy from Marta Kauffman and Howard J. Morris about two older women (played by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin) whose husbands have fallen in love. It went for seven seasons.
In 2018 Netflix added “The Kominsky Method,” Lorre’s dramedy about an aging acting coach, starring Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin. Lorre, one of TV’s most successful producers, had taken the pitch around Hollywood with the Oscar-winning stars in tow and been roundly rejected.
“There are all sorts of ways that you get shown to the door,” he said. “Nobody will actually come out and say it’s age-related.” The show ran for three seasons on Netflix and received 11 Emmy nominations.
Netflix subsequently commissioned other shows with older protagonists, including the geopolitical thriller “Zero Day,” starring Robert De Niro; Lorre’s sitcom “Leanne,” with the comic Leanne Morgan; and Schur’s “A Man on the Inside,” starring Ted Danson as a private investigator and set in a retirement home in its first season.
This trend has expanded to other networks, cable channels and streamers. (You can’t make a show called “The Old Man,” the FX action thriller, without at least one old man. And “The Good Fight,” the streaming follow-up to “The Good Wife,” was the rare spinoff to yield the spotlight to older characters.) It has even made its way to unscripted television with shows like ABC’s “The Golden Bachelor” and “Bachelorette” and Netflix’s “The Later Daters.”
There are advantages to writing roles for older characters. Schur, in developing “A Man on the Inside,” had worries about casting the show. But he discovered a wealth of talented older performers eager for substantive roles.
And the stories he created for them didn’t feel stale. “There are a billion high school stories, because everybody who’s watching TV went to high school,” he said. “But not everybody who is watching TV has gotten to be the age of 78 yet. So you get to see something that’s ahead of you.” And if what’s ahead of you isn’t just wisecracks and rocking chairs — if it includes mystery, romance and adventure — so much the better.
Howe echoed this. “It’s exciting, because some of this still does feel very new and fresh and surprising,” she said. “There are so many opportunities to reveal deeper layers.”
Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey” and “The Gilded Age,” which stars Christine Baranski, 74, and Cynthia Nixon, 60, has always embraced older characters, particularly older women.
“They have a certain amount of knowledge of how the world works, which their daughters and sons don’t yet have,” he said. And the actors who play them bring decades of experience and audience affection to the role.
“There’s something about those older players that makes it believable that they’ve lived a long life before the public has got to know them,” he said.
Still, Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the creators of “The Boroughs,” thought a series about a group of retirees who battle mysterious creatures plaguing their community might be a tough sell. But Netflix, likely buoyed by the support of Matt and Ross Duffer (“Stranger Things”), who came on as executive producers, and by stars like Davis, Pullman and Woodard, said yes immediately.
“We thought we were being niche, and it turns out it’s not really niche or surprising anymore,” Addiss said. “We’re kind of in the zeitgeist.”
What sets “The Boroughs” apart from many of its contemporaries is that nearly all of the main characters are over 70, not merely one or two. Older characters lend the show a unique texture (there’s a heartbreaking karaoke scene set in a memory care facility) and drive several plot points. Some characters aren’t believed because dementia is feared. Another can’t make a run for it because he needs his cancer medication.
“The reality of where they’re starting is a little bit more rich and complex,” Addiss said. “That’s also what makes it more fun.”
That was the appeal for Woodard. She has never experienced a drought in her career, but many of the scripts she receives now feel similar.
“If you write a grandma, what’s the grandma doing?” she said. “I’m not going to sit and say, ‘Oh baby it’s going to be OK, have some tea.’ That’s fine. But the vast, vast majority of the grandmas are not like that.”
Woodard called her meaty role in the series “a gift.” (Though when she was in summer clothes shooting during a high desert winter, she briefly wondered if the gift could be returned.) Pullman, her co-star, spoke of the “delectable” pleasure of working among his peers.
“Everybody has been around enough to know they don’t have time to be coy or self-centered,” he said. “We’re too far down the trail to pull shenanigans.”
Despite the arrival of high-profile series like “The Boroughs,” the actual percentage of speaking roles for older people on TV hasn’t meaningfully changed in the last decade, not even when streaming is included.
Smith and her colleagues are preparing to release a study of the most popular 2024 series across network, cable and streaming. It found that only 9 percent of speaking characters were 65 or older, she said.
And yet, it would be hard to deny that these recent roles are better, in quality if not quantity, even as their relative scarcity suggests viewers are being deprived of novel stories, of time with beloved actors and, if they are younger, of an expansive sense of what may lie ahead. Because aging is, after all, a best-case scenario and a nearly universal truth.
“It’s so easy to identify with that,” Lorre said. “Even if you’re a younger viewer watching, you’re getting some insight as to what’s coming for us all.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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