Bette Midler looked back on one of the biggest mistakes of her career. The actress who appeared on the latest episode of David Duchovny’s Fail Better podcast opened up about the regrets surrounding her autobiographical sitcom, ‘Bette’. She noted one of the show’s biggest failures was the exit of Lindsay Lohan, who walked out of the show after the pilot episode. Let’s check out what she had revealed.
Bette Midler said she didn’t know what it meant to make the sitcom
The veteran actress recalled with Duchovny, “I did a television show, Bette. Does it get any more generic than that? A big, big, big mistake. I think for several reasons. It was the wrong motivation. It was a part of the media I simply did not understand. I watched it. I appreciated it. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t know what it meant to make it.”
In the one-season sitcom, which revolves around her grounded personal life at home with her college professor husband, Roy (Kevin Dunn, then Robert Hays in later episodes), teenage daughter Rose (Lohan) and she appeared as herself was created by Jeffrey Lane and aired on CBS from October 2000 through March 2001 and filmed from 18 episodes.
“I had made theatrical live events. I had made films. I had made variety television shows. I had been on talk shows. But I had never done a situation comedy,” Bette continued. “I didn’t realize what the pace was. And I didn’t understand what the hierarchy was. And no one bothered to tell me.”
She continues,”Well, the hierarchy should have been, since Bette is the name of the show, you should have been number one on the hierarchy.”
The actress who was also the EP of the show responded that she had been “kicked to the curb immediately” as they was no to guiding her through the process of the television world, she also noted, “But because I was so green, I didn’t understand what my options were, what choices I could have made to improve my situation. I didn’t know that I could have taken charge.”
Moreover, she admitted that she felt Lohan’s departure after the pilot episode is one of the major causes of the show’s failure.
“After the pilot, Lindsay Lohan decided she didn’t want to do it, or she had other fish to fry,” Midler noted. “So Lindsay Lohan left the building and I said, well, now what do you do?”
“It was extremely chaotic . . . and if I had been in my right mind, or if I had known that my part of my duties were to stand up and say, ‘This absolutely will not do, I’m going to sue,’ then I would have done that,” she shared. “But I seem to have been cosseted in some way that I couldn’t get to the writers’ room. I couldn’t speak to the showrunner. I couldn’t make myself clear.”
She also became too “taxing,” and she was “thrilled” once it ended as “The mad scramble to keep up was just too intense.”
Also Read: Lindsay Lohan Shared She Cried After Find Out Her Son is Watching ‘The Parent Trap’
