Stan Zimmerman thinks axing the gay housekeeper from 'The Golden Girls' before it went to a full series was a "smart move."
The TV writer penned several episodes for the classic sitcom - which starred Betty White, Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty as four retired women living together in Florida - thinks bosses were right to let housekeeper Coco (Charles Levin) after the pilot episode because of logistics but still thinks it would have been fun to explore the "possibilities" of what the character may have got up to.
He told People: "As great as Coco was — and he was very funny, and I love that there was a gay character — it wasn't really needed, and they were smart to let that go. “I wish they had dealt with it, or had him back for a special episode…maybe he fell in love, went somewhere. Maybe he opened a B+B in Key West. I don't know. There's so many possibilities."
The scriptwriter - who also worked on 'Roseanne' and 'Gilmore Girls' - claimed that he did try to bring the topic up with producers on the show during its original run in the late 1980s and early 1990s but was told to
"move forward" from it completely as he expressed his surprise that the sitcom is still being talked about today.
He said: "I remember bringing that up, but they felt, at the time, ‘Let it go, move forward'. I don't think they realized that we'd be talking about the show 30, 40 years later and picking it apart. I would see waves of it where young people would come up to me and they would know every line of the show.
"It was a way for a lot of younger people to connect with their grandparents. And it was also a way for those in the LGBTQ community to connect with their older parents or grandparents and have a way to start a discussion about who they really were."
