Bette Midler‘s 2000 CBS sitcom Bette didn’t live long on the air — though it lives forever in infamy, thanks to a loungey a cappella version of Kid Rock‘s “Bawitdaba” she performed on it.
In short, the show was “a flop,” one of the worst of her career, she told David Duchovny‘s Fail Better podcast.
The Tony, Emmy and Grammy winner unpacked the “extremely chaotic” situation, and while she admitted she “didn’t know what it meant to make [a sitcom],” she also threw some shade at her onscreen daughter Lindsay Lohan.
“After the pilot, Lindsay Lohan decided she didn’t want to do it. Or she had other fish to fry,” Midler revealed.
“So, Lindsay Lohan left the building. And I said, ‘Well, now what do you do?'”
Duchovny noted Lohan’s contract should have prevented that exit, but Midler was afraid of standing up for herself as a producer for fear of being “labeled a grandstander.”
“If I had been in my right mind, or if I had known that part of my duties were to stand up to say, ‘This absolutely will not do, I’m gonna sue,’ then I would have done that,” Midler said.
The performer also revealed she was “glad” she was fired the day after she did an interview about the sitcom on The Late Show with David Letterman. When Dave asked her about the show, Midler said, “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done in my entire life,” adding, “It’s like being a dung beetle, rolling a pile of s*** up a hill.”
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