Bette Midler Partially Blames Lindsay Lohan for Failed Sitcom ‘Bette’

Bette Midler is getting candid about her failed sitcom Bette.

“It was a big, big mistake,” she told David Duchovny on the most recent episode of his Fail Better podcast.

The series, which launched on CBS in 2000 and ran for one season with 16 episodes, was largely autobiographical, starring Midler as a famous singer and actress who was adored by fans.

In the pilot episode, Lindsay Lohan played her 13-year-old daughter Rose, but Midler revealed that Lohan, now 37, eventually dropped out of the project, which she feels may have contributed to the show being a flop.

“Things happened that were so astonishing,” Midler told Duchovny. “I didn’t know those things could happen. For instance, Lindsay Lohan was cast as my daughter in the pilot. Well, after the pilot, Lindsay Lohan decided she didn’t want to do it. Or she had other fish to fry. So Lindsay Lohan left the building. and I said, well, now what do you do?”

Midler said she also played a big part in why the show didn’t do well. “Bette. Does it get any more generic than that? Bette. A big, big mistake. I think for several reasons,” she said, poking fun at the sitcom’s name.

“It was the wrong motivation. It was a part of the media I simply did not understand,” Midler continued. “I watched it. I appreciated it. it, I enjoyed it, but I didn’t know what it meant to make [a TV series.] 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.”

Midler, who was an EP on the show, says that she didn’t quite grasp what her role was on the show, and looking back, she wishes that she’d done more to control the series’ direction.

“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 said. “Well, I was kicked to the curb immediately and I didn’t know what to do about it… I didn’t know that I could have taken charge, that I could have asserted, because I think because I was so terrified of being branded a grandstander.”

At the time, Lohan’s star was on the rise, after the success of her 1998 film The Parent Trap. Her career-making movies Freaky Friday and Mean Girls wouldn’t come out until 2003 and 2004, respectfully.

Fail Better, which is a new podcast from Lemonada, features Duchovy talking to high-profile guests like Midler (and recently Ben Stiller) about their biggest fails and what they learned from them.

On the podcast’s homepage, Duchovny, 63, explains the reasoning behind his show’s launch. “I feel like I’ve been failing my entire life, so I can speak from plenty of experience,” he writes.

“Sure, I was on The X Files and Californication, I wrote some books and made some music. But I also got a literal F in The New York Times. I had a high-profile divorce and a magical mystery tour through rehab. So now I want to get into the way that failure looms over all of us and really shapes who we are. What’s good about that, what’s bad about that, what’s holding us back in shame.”

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Fail Better is available to stream wherever you get your podcasts.