The Sly Sunniness of Betty White

In 1973, before the series’ fourth season, the producers of discussed the casting of a new character they were soon to introduce. Sue Ann Nivens, the host of the program on the fictional WJM-TV news station, would be cunning and cutting and a foil for her colleague Mary’s adamant optimism. She should be played, the producers thought, by a Betty White type, Moore —someone who, like Moore’s real-life friend Betty White, had a reputation for sunniness that the sitcom could steadily subvert. They finally asked White herself to fill the role, and the result was a performance thatand the sitcom as a genre. White, who died yesterday at 99, played Sue Ann as setup and punch line at once, an embodiment and a rejection of the demands American culture made of women. Through the character, too, Betty White satirized the “Betty White type.” She extended that satire through the many, many other characters she played, and through her own evolving persona. She spent the decades of her career—, to be precise—taking people’s underestimations of her and treating them as what they were: a joke.