The character Sophia Petrillo was originally supposed to be a recurring guest character, but test audiences loved the character so much that after the pilot was filmed and aired, the decision was made to write out Charles Levin (Coco) and to make room for Sophia as the fourth main character.
The pilot established that Sophia Petrillo had a stroke that "destroyed the part of the brain that censored what she says." This would allow Sophia's character to say such outrageous things throughout the show and get away with it.
Rue McClanahan doesn't have a Southern accent in this episode, because prior to filming, director Jay Sandrich told her he didn't want to hear it. After the show was picked up from the pilot episode, McClanahan went to the producers and offered to play Blanche as a modified Mae West-style character. The producers asked her why she wasn't doing it with a Southern accent. At that point, the character of Blanche Devereaux was fully realized, complete with Southern accent.
Charles Levin who played Coco, the gay live-in cook, was to be a regular. Susan Harris wrote the character out not because he was gay--her shows Soap (1977) and Hail to the Chief (1985) also had openly gay characters--but because she considered it sexist for a man to be taking care of the women, regardless of his sexual orientation. Nevertheless, he was the first openly gay character in any media produced by a division of The Walt Disney Company.
According to Bea Arthur in her one woman Broadway show, "Just Between Friends", Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty) has a line in this episode that had to be changed from its original to a less intense version. The line, "The man is a scuzzball", was originally "The man is a douchebag", until the network executives demanded the change.