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

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

There are plenty of reasons why a show gets canceled. Sometimes, production costs balloon too high. Other times, ratings fall too low. But canceling a show because it's too popular? That sounds almost too crazy to be real — but back in the 1950's, that actually happened to one of television's brightest stars: Betty White.

While you might be more familiar with her as Rose Nylund on "The Golden Girls" — even though she almost played a different part entirely – Betty White was once the star of one of TV's first sitcom hits, "Life with Elizabeth." By today's standards, there wasn't much revolutionary about the show. It focused on Elizabeth, played by White, and her husband, Alvin (Del Moore), who are fairly ordinary people that get into extraordinary circumstances. The series debuted live in 1952 on KLAC, a TV station in Los Angeles, and was a big enough hit to earn White a Los Angles area Emmy award. Eventually, it was picked up by Guild Films, who decided to produce episodes that could be sold to other stations in syndication.

Before long, there were dozens of TV stations all over the country buying episodes of "Life with Elizabeth," and the show continued to grow in popularity. Unfortunately for Betty White and the series, its popularity led to its very undoing.

Within two years, Guild Films had recorded 65 episodes of "Life with Elizabeth" and the show was a popular syndication purchase for many television stations. However, the production company was concerned that making too many new episodes would water down the product and cut into the revenue they were making from selling episodes they had already filmed. So, at the height of its fame, production on "Life with Elizabeth" was halted, never to be resumed again. As you might expect, stations eventually got tired of running the same episodes over and over again, and it became much harder to sell them — which explains why the series is mostly forgotten about today, while other sitcoms of the era, like "I Love Lucy," live on forever.

For Betty White's part, she wasn't a big fan of the show being filmed, as opposed to shooting it live when it started on KLAC. "It was a little like doing comedy in a mortuary," White said in the book "The Women Who Made Television." "And it threw our timing all off." Following the success of "Life with Elizabeth," White would go on to have one of the most successful careers in television history, from being a part of one of the best sitcoms ever made – "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" — to winning an Emmy for hosting "Saturday Night Live" in 2010.