Betty White’s First Sitcom Was Canceled Because It Became Too Popular

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There are many explanation why a present will get canceled. Typically, manufacturing prices balloon too excessive. Different occasions, rankings fall too low. However canceling a present as a result of it is too in style? That sounds virtually too loopy to be actual — however again within the 1950’s, that truly occurred to considered one of tv’s brightest stars: Betty White.

When you is likely to be extra conversant in her as Rose Nylund on “The Golden Women” — though she virtually performed a special half fully – Betty White was as soon as the star of considered one of TV’s first sitcom hits, “Life with Elizabeth.” By in the present day’s requirements, there wasn’t a lot revolutionary in regards to the present. It targeted on Elizabeth, performed by White, and her husband, Alvin (Del Moore), who’re pretty atypical those that get into extraordinary circumstances. The sequence debuted reside in 1952 on KLAC, a TV station in Los Angeles, and was a large enough hit to earn White a Los Angles space Emmy award. Finally, it was picked up by Guild Movies, who determined to supply episodes that could possibly be bought to different stations in syndication.

Earlier than lengthy, there have been dozens of TV stations all around the nation shopping for episodes of “Life with Elizabeth,” and the present continued to develop in reputation. Sadly for Betty White and the sequence, its reputation led to its very undoing.

Inside two years, Guild Movies had recorded 65 episodes of “Life with Elizabeth” and the present was a well-liked syndication buy for a lot of tv stations. Nevertheless, the manufacturing firm was involved that making too many new episodes would water down the product and lower into the income they had been making from promoting episodes that they had already filmed. So, on the peak of its fame, manufacturing on “Life with Elizabeth” was halted, by no means to be resumed once more. As you may count on, stations ultimately bought uninterested in working the identical episodes over and over, and it grew to become a lot tougher to promote them — which explains why the sequence is usually forgotten about in the present day, whereas different sitcoms of the period, like “I Love Lucy,” reside on endlessly.

For Betty White’s half, she wasn’t an enormous fan of the present being filmed, versus taking pictures it reside when it began on KLAC. “It was a bit like doing comedy in a mortuary,” White stated within the e-book “The Ladies Who Made Tv.” “And it threw our timing all off.” Following the success of “Life with Elizabeth,” White would go on to have some of the profitable careers in tv historical past, from being part of the most effective sitcoms ever made – “The Mary Tyler Moore Present” — to profitable an Emmy for internet hosting “Saturday Evening Dwell” in 2010.