Betty White Was More than a TV Star — She Was Television

Television is too expansive a medium to sum up succinctly. Since its invention in the 1940s, television has expanded gradually and then rapidly from a bunch of ragtag performers in New York City going live a few hours a day and beaming low-budget nonsense into a couple thousand homes across America to what it is today — an interconnected mesh of hundreds of streaming services and networks all producing seemingly millions of hours of content every year, ranging from shows with the production costs of major motion pictures to, well, a bunch of low-budget nonsense from ragtag performers across the world beamed to phones via the internet. Television, what it was and what it is and what it will be, is a vast constellation. It’s a galaxy.

And Betty White wasn’t just a television star. I do not know science, but — Betty White was television’s neutron star, with a body of work so mind-bogglingly massive and so dense that it alone stands representative of everything the medium is capable of being. This one person, Betty Marion White Ludden, simply was television.

White should absolutely be remembered for Golden Girls, an iconic, Emmy-winning, timeless masterpiece of sitcom artistry powered by four of the greatest talents television has ever seen. As Rose Nylund, the greatest simpleton in sitcom history, White played dumb with such smarts. The way she was able to wring so much comedy out of what were often just absurdist monologues about life in the TV-G Lynchian fever dream that was St. Olaf is proof of her power. You think about Rose Nylund and I bet you can still picture a herring being shot out of a cannon, such was the power of her delivery.

What is important to know, especially right now as we collectively assess what we just lost, is that Betty White’s career started some 55 years before Rose Nylund ever ate her first slice of cheesecake. Born in 1922 (her 100th birthday was just two weeks away), White performed in her first radio show in 1930. 1930. By the time White was in her 20s, this new thing called “television” was happening, and White quickly made a name for herself by hosting the daily talk show Hollywood on Television. Oh — and each episode of Hollywood on Television lasted five and a half hours and went live six days a week. White was on TV 33 hours a week from 1949 to 1953!

So intertwined is their origin, it’s hard to figure out if television made Betty White or if Betty White made television. When you look at her body of work, she truly did it all. She was a game show fixture for some 30 years, bringing her natural wit and impeccable comedic timing to shows like Password and, most notably, the boozy party that was Match Game in the 1970s. White was, without a doubt, one of the most reliable performers in Hollywood when it came to putting someone on live (or live-to-tape) television with zero prep and expecting them to get laughs.

But it was her sitcom work that — and I can’t stress this enough — changed the game. For one thing, White was the first woman to produce a sitcom when she took on the titular role in Life with Elizabeth in 1953 (which is streaming, BTW). By the time the team behind The Mary Tyler Moore Show were looking to cast a Betty White type to play Sue Ann Nivens, a self-absorbed nymphomaniac, they weren’t even sure they could get Betty White… because Betty White was already Betty White in 1973. But they got her — and she killed.

These characters, Sue Ann Nivens and Rose Nylund, make White’s impact on television, especially comedy, impossible to overstate. Even though younger generations probably remember her most as the foul-mouthed granny in 1999’s Lake Placid, Betty White truly did not have a go-to character. She had, as the younger generations say, the range. There is a vast expanse of sitcom archetypes between Nivens and Nylund, and White could play them all with equal efficiency, expertise, gravitas, and intelligence. Hearing Sue Ann read Murray Slaughter to filth is every bit as funny as hearing Rose say “but it was five years before I knew what made your eyes go back in your head.” Scripted or unscripted, smart or silly, classic or modern, Betty White just was television.

This is the moment we’ve all dreaded. For the past decade, just seeing White’s name trend on Twitter sent a shock into everyone’s system. And now that moment is here, and it feels a bit like the universe folding in on itself. Again, my area of expertise is television and not science, but maybe Betty White isn’t television’s neutron star. Maybe a better metaphor labels White as television’s big bang. By lighting up the screen for pretty much the entirety of her 99 years on Earth, White entertained billions. But more than that, she lit a path for others to follow. Her work across genres helped inspire and create so much of what we love about television today.

So try not to think about how we now have to live in a world without Betty White. Instead, think about how we have the privilege of enjoying a wonderful universe of television because of Betty White.