Designing Women

Designing Women was a CBS sitcom that ran from 1986 to 1993, created by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and centered on four women who run the Sugarbaker interior design firm in Atlanta. The show was known for confronting politics head on, taking on sexism, racism, and reproductive rights with unusual directness for network primetime. Its most celebrated moment came in the 1987 second-season episode "Killing All the Right People," in which a young gay designer dying of AIDS asks the women to plan his funeral. Bloodworth-Thomason wrote it after her own mother died of AIDS contracted through a blood transfusion, and the title came from a nurse's cruel remark she overheard. The episode's compassion made it a landmark in early television's treatment of the AIDS crisis and endeared the show to LGBTQ+ audiences.