Betty White Slated to Host “Saturday Night Live.”
More than half-a-million petitioners join FaceBook campaign.
At 88, Betty White is enjoying as much popularity, good press, and good work as ever in her sixty-year career. In the last several months, White has starred in the Super Bowl’s most popular super-commercial, collected a Screen Actor’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and been the focus of an unprecedented FaceBook campaign to make her the host of a “Saturday Night Live” episode.
In the fan-favourite Snickers commercial, White takes a hard hit in a touch football game, coming-up muddy but undaunted. The SAG Award recognized her lifetime dedication to animals, the cause which until recently had taken precedence over her acting career. Internet historians cannot accurately account for the origins of the FB frenzy that revved into overdrive in the wake of White’s recent publicity.
People Magazine and WNBC said yesterday that White will host a special Mothers’ Day edition of SNL, set to air on May 8. Other SNL moms will join her, insiders reported, dropping Tina Fey’s, Amy Poehler’s, and Molly Shannon’s names. Although not a mom, SNL alumna Rachel Dratch is also scheduled to join the reunion.
Speculation about White’s appearance swirls like a Texas twister, creating potential for a high-intensity sequel to the original FaceBook saga. Already FaceBook users and other devoted Betty White fans have begun offering suggestions, including an appearance on “Bronx Beat” or a “Weekend Update” impersonation of a rapidly-aging Lindsay Lohan or Brittney Spears. Producers already have agreed to limit White’s hosting duties, normally exhausting for celebrities in their twenties. The host and cast normally rehearse relentlessly during the week leading-up to airtime, and then they present the show for a live New York audience.
Somewhat ironically, many of the FaceBook campaigners wore diapers when Betty White became a regular on the hugely successful “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” In what many fans still consider White’s signature role, she played Sue Ann Nivens, “the happy home maker,” whose tooth-ache sweet on-air personality contrasted with her sardonic, man-hungry, back-biting and cut-throat newsroom self. For her work with MTM, White happily collected back-to-back Emmy Awards.
