Bette Midler opened up this week on a podcast about Lindsay Lohan and the demise of their 2000s sitcom “Bette.”
The failed CBS show only ran for one season and ended after Lohan suddenly jumped ship, Midler told David Duchovny on his “Fail Better” podcast.
“Lindsay Lohan was cast as my daughter in the pilot. Well, after the pilot, Lindsay Lohan decided she didn’t want to do it,” Midler said. “Or she had other fish to fry. So, Lindsay Lohan left the building. And I said, ‘well, now what do you do?’”
Reflecting on how she could have handled the “extremely chaotic” situation differently, Midler says she should have sued Lohan for walking out after the pilot.
“If I had been in my right mind, or if I had known that 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. 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.”
“I didn’t know that I could have taken charge, that I could have asserted, because I think I was so terrified of being branded a grandstander.”
It’s important to note Lohan was a child actor at the time, so it’s unlikely she intentionally plotted the show’s downfall.
Still, Midler believes the series’ brief stint was “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.”
“Bette” ran from October 2000 through March 2001 on CBS.
Despite the show’s short-lived run, Lohan seems to have fond memories of her former boss. She posted a throwback snap of the duo just last week captioned, “Had such a blast filming with the incredible @bettemidler.”
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