The presence of The Golden Girls on Looking couldn't have come about in a more organic way. Earlier in the season, Patrick and his former roommate Agustín (Frankie J. Alvarez) said goodbye to each other by quoting the lyrics to The Golden Girls theme song, "Thank You for Being a Friend." The scene happened spontaneously, the result of a shared passion among the cast and crew.

"That scene was written differently," Groff recalled. "We were quoting Friends, the scene in Friends where Rachel moves out. Rachel's leaving and Monica's like, 'It's the end of an era. It's the end of an era.' That was what the scene was originally written as. And then we got there on the day, and we were just talking about The Golden Girls and our obsession with The Golden Girls and our obsession with the theme song of The Golden Girls, and we were saying how the characters are kind of like Rose and Blanche and Dorothy. We were making this joke on set about how we should recreate the theme song of The Golden Girls with our characters, and Andrew Haigh [the show's co-executive producer, who wrote and directed the episode] was like, 'We should shoot it.'"

The final scene of Patrick watching The Golden Girls was similarly off-the-cuff and inspired, in part, by Groff's own habits.

"I would come home from a day of shooting Looking and — all the episodes of Golden Girls are on YouTube — and I would YouTube some Golden Girls and watch it while I ate a salad and went to bed," he said.

According to Looking creator Michael Lannan, Haigh had a similar habit, because The Golden Girls, in addition to living on via YouTube, was on late every night where he was staying. (When I spoke to Lannan, I neglected to tell him I know exactly when Haigh would have been watching The Golden Girls, between midnight and 2 a.m. on The Hallmark Channel, because that's when I, too, watch it, every night before bed.)

The Golden Girls has gotten me through some of the toughest times in my life, from break-ups to my stint in outpatient rehab. I've referred to it, quite seriously, as one of the few things in my life that keeps me sane. Silly as that may sound, the soothing power of the series cannot be underestimated. On one level, it's nostalgia — for those of us who grew up watching The Golden Girls, it's just nice to sit back and rewatch the episodes, remembering which jokes went over our heads as kids. And, of course, there's also a certain nostalgia to simply watching a good multi-cam sitcom, of which there are so few these days: While the style of joke-telling feels distinctly '80s, the punch lines remain laugh-out-loud funny.