Betty White TV Shows: Inside 12 of Her Biggest Hits
Sometimes you have to embrace the cliche, and when it comes to Betty White, that's exactly what we're doing — she was a national treasure, who spent 82 of her 99 years performing and was featured in more than a dozen Betty White TV shows! Born January 17, 1922 in Oak Park, Illinois, she made her television debut in 1939 when the medium was in its earliest days of development and by 1952 was hosting her own morning variety show.
This guide to Betty White TV shows, which takes us from that variety show all the way to Hot in Cleveland in the 2010s, and includes 10 other series in between, only scratches the surface of her vast accomplishments on the small screen. Nonetheless, it serves as our tribute to and celebration of this incredible talent.
1. The Betty White Show (1952 to 1953, 1954)
CAST: Betty White
PREMISE: A morning show that would feature Betty White interviewing guests, performing in skis, singing and featuring a children's segment.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: From 1952 to 1953, the show aired locally on KTLA, but Betty's growing popularity led to NBC picking it up in 1954. Unfortunately, due to low ratings it was canceled at the end of the year.
2. Life with Elizabeth (1953 to 1955)
CAST: Betty White (Elizabeth), Del Moore (Alvin), Jack Narz (on-camera announcer)
PREMISE: A suburban couple who would get into various "incidents" in episodes that would consist of three segments running eight to 10 minutes each.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: "We opted to go for three separate situations on the premise that when you or your friends tell a funny anecdote about something that happened, the stories last no more than five or six minutes," Betty wrote in her memoir, Here We Go Again: My Life in Television. "My contention was that if you try to stretch that anecdote into a half hour, the joke wears thin."
3. Date with the Angels (1957 to 1958)
CAST: Betty White (Vickie Angel), Bill Williams (Gus Angel)
PREMISE: Typical situation comedy with newlyweds Vickie and Gus Angel embracing their new life with friends and family — though an early, unique angle of Vickie losing herself in little fantasy sequences was quickly quickly dropped at the insistence of sponsor Plymouth.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: Admitted Betty White, "Without our dream sequences, our show flattened out and became just one more run-of-the-mill domestic comedy. I can truthfully say that was the only time I wanted to get out of a show."
4. The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1973 to 1977)
CAST: Mary Tyler Moore (Mary Richards), Edward Asner (Lou Grant), Gavin MacLeod (Murray Slaughter), Ted Knight (Ted Baxter), Valerie Harper (Rhoda Morgenstern), Betty White (Sue Ann Nivens)
PREMISE: Obviously the focus was on WJM associate news producer Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), but Betty White often stole the show as the newscast's on-so-subtly bitchy "Happy Homemaker" Sue Ann Nivens.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: Ed Robertson, the host of TV Confidential, points out, "In the late '50s on shows like Life with Elizabeth and Date with the Angels, in many ways Betty White was sort of a traditional June Cleaver type of figure. Then she reinvented herself when she played Sue Ann Niven — nobody expected her to be the bitch, but that was just great casting and a masterstroke from whoever came up with that."
5. The Betty White Show (1977 to 1978)
CAST: Betty White (Joyce Whitman), John Hillerman (John Elliot), Georgia Engel (Mitzi Maloney)
PREMISE: A show within a show focusing on Betty as actress Joyce Whitman, cast in the series Undercover Woman, a spoof of Angie Dickinson's Police Woman.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: "The problem with the series," suggest Mike Pingel, author of Betty White Rules the World, "was that everybody thought it was going to be a spinoff from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which it wasn't. People wanted to see Sue Ann Nivens, and they didn't get her."
6. Mama's Family (1983 to 1984, 1986)
CAST: Vicki Lawrence (Mama), Ken Berry (Vinton Harper), Dorothy Lyman (Naomi Oates Harper), Betty White (recurring as Ellen harper-Jackson), Carol Burnett (recurring as Eunice Harper Higgins)
PREMISE: Originally a recurring skit on The Carol Burnett Show, this was spun off into its own series with Vicki Lawrence as Thelma "Mama" Harper, Matriarch of her rural Southern family. Betty White had a recurring role as Mama's daughter Ellen, the snobbish one who thought she was better than everyone else in the family.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: Jim Colucci, author of Golden Girls Forever: An Unauthorized Look Behind the Lanai, comments, "Mama's Family was a mediocre show, though a lot of people love it and will be mad at me for saying that. At the same time, when Betty shows up, I'm, like, 'Oh, good!' When Betty was on, you knew it would be a better episode."
7. The Golden Girls (1985 to 1992)
CAST: Bea Arthur (Dorothy Zbornak), Betty White (Rose Nylund), Rue McClanahan (Blanche Devereaux), Esetelle Getty (Sophia Petrillo)
PREMISE: Four older ladies live together in Miami during their golden years, sharing the joys and occasional tragedies of life, but get through it all with laughter.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: Jim Colucci shares that when he was writing his Golden Girls book, Rue McClanahan told him "that Betty did something that she never would have known how to do. Which was that Betty, being the brilliant woman that she was, when she was talking to you, there's that twinkle in her eye and you know she's five steps ahead of you. You see the intricate machinery in her eyes, yet the moment they yelled action for Rose, her face went totally blank. Rue said that Betty was able to drain the light and intelligence out of her eyes when she was playing Rose and just really take everything literally like Rose would, and not show the comic genius inside her head."
8. The Golden Palace (1992 to 1993)
CAST: Betty White (Rose Nylund), Rue McClanahan (Blance Devereaux), Estelle Getty (Sophia Petrillo), Don Cheadle (Roland Wilson), Cheech Marin (Chuy Castillos), Billy L. Sullivan (Oliver Webb)
PREMISE: After Dorothy gets married and moves out, the other ladies decide to invest in and take over a Miami hotel, which turns out to be struggling much more than they were led to believe, forcing them to be take more hands-on involvement with day-to-day operations.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: The problem with The Golden Palace is that in many ways it undoes the fantasy of The Golden Girls that your friends are always there for you as you get older. In reality, at least as shown in the series, one marries, moves away and the others, according to Colucci, "work like dogs as hotel maids well into your 70s and 80s, so it really undid the goodwill of the message of The Golden Girls."
9. Bob (1992 to 1993)
CAST: Bob Newhart (Bob McKay), Carlene Watkins (Kaye McKay), Cynthia Stevenson (Trisha McKay), Betty White (Sylvia Schmitt, season 2)
PREMISE: When we meet him, Bob McKay is a former comic book artist who is working for a greeting card company, but gets a chance to bring his most popular character back to four-color life. But in season 2, he's working for Schmitt Greetings and Sylvia Schmitt (Betty White).
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: “It’s very hard, as in the case with Bob, to come onto a show that’s floundering through no fault of anyone, because Bob Newhart is a genius, and try and re-conceive it," Jim Colucci explains. "That’s a lot of pressure to put on an actor, so Betty came onto Bob as this new character and a refocus of the show. It’s a lot to try and turn the ship around once it’s sailing and I don’t think it worked.”
10. Maybe This Time (1995)
CAST: Marie Osmond (Julia Wallace), Betty White (Shirley Wallace), Ashley Johnson (Gracie Wallae), Craig Ferguson (Logan McDonough)
PREMISE: Single mother Julia Wallace runs a family bakery with her mother, Shirley, while raising 11-year-old daughter Gracie.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: For Jim Colucci, the show wasn't for him and apparently it didn't fit audience expectations from Betty White given how short a run it had. "With Betty," he says, "I want her comic genius and wit, and this was maybe too soft a family show."
11. Ladies Man (1999)
CAST: Alfred Molina (Jimmy Stiles), Sharon Lawrence (Donna Stiles), Betty White (Mitzi Stiles), Dixie Carter (Peaches), Park Overall (Claire Stiles)
PREMISE: In a nutshell, woodworker Jimmy Stiles is a guy living under one roof with a variety of women he's connected to in various ways, all of whom complicate his life.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: Points out Colucci, "That was a show that had an amazing cast and I can't say that it wasn't a success creatively. At the time it was talking about a man surrounded by a bunch of women. I think we were getting into the age of women having more power and more say and claiming equality from men. And I think it was just a case of the bar for CBS for ratings was very high and they couldn't meet it."
12. Hot in Cleveland (2010 to 2015)
CAST: Valerie Bertinelli (Melanie Hope Moretti), Jane Leeves (Rejoyla "Joy" Scroggs), Wendie Malick (Victoria Chase), Betty White (Elka Ostrovsky)
PREMISE: Three best friends from Los Angeles, decide, after surviving an emergency plane landing in Cleveland, Ohio, to relocate there and lease a home, the caretaker of which is the cranky Elka Ostrovsky.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES: Enthuses Mike Pingel, "It was kind of like The Golden Girls for those years, and it really worked, because you had the three aging women and Betty was the vodka-drinking, profanity-speaking, no holds barred presence on the show, who would hit someone's leg and say, 'Oh, you're a whore.' She took everything she'd learned from all those years on all those shows, and brought it here. A great last series for her."
Adds Ed Robertson, "In the last decade, Betty White did what William Shatner has been doing and what Adam West did the last decade before he died, which is to play a parody of herself on screen."
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