Dolly Parton Starred In A Sitcom That's Impossible To Watch

Dolly Parton, a titan of the music industry, an amusement park tycoon, a philanthropist, philosopher, actress, and probably some kind of benevolent deity, never quite conquered the medium of scripted television. Of course, Dolly appeared on TV all the time, going back as far as 1956's "Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour," but she most typically appeared as a singer or musical performer. Throughout her career, she sang on shows like "Music City, U.S.A.," "Hee Haw," and "The Mike Douglas Show." In 1976, she even hosted her own variety show, "Dolly!," which, sadly, only lasted 26 episodes. That's not to be confused with "Dolly," the variety show she launched in 1987. That, sadly, only lasted 22 episodes. Dolly was on "Hollywood Squares," "Captain Kangaroo," and even the 1983 animated version of "Alvin and the Chipmunks." She played herself on "Designing Women" in the 1990s. Dolly has always been a stalwart, dedicated performer, and has always been energetic and professional. 

It almost seems like an oversight that Dolly was never the star of her own sitcom. Given her mastery of film, music, and on-air TV performances, one might think that a sitcom would be the next logical step. Films like "9 to 5," "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," and the ultra-Southern "Steel Magnolias" proved that she could act, and who wouldn't want to see the wacky adventures of Dolly Parton, even if she was playing a fictional version of herself? 

As it turns out, she tried. According to the Lost Media Wiki, Dolly was to star in a 1994 sitcom called "Heavens to Betsy." Information is spotty on the series, with a lot of it culled from the show's IMDb trivia page (i.e. not entirely substantiated), but it seems that Dolly was to play a former Vegas lounge singer who has a near-death experience and decides to move back to her small Tennessee hometown. 

The show, however, never aired. Apart from scant clips on YouTube, it is apparently lost to time. 

It seems that "Heavens to Betsy" was plagued with production problems from the start. Dolly played Betsy Baxter, who worked as a waitress at a diner called Spec's (named after Speck Rhodes, Dolly's long-ago co-star of "The Porter Wagoner Show"). The show also starred Boyd Gaines as the local clergyman Tommy Rockwood, Constance Shulman as Betsy's best friend Donna, Connie Ray, and the young Elisabeth Harnois, still a teenager at the time. Dolly didn't want to fly all the way out to Disney's ordinary headquarters in Los Angeles to shoot the series, however, insisting instead that production be held in Disney's Orlando studio. This would allow her to commute to the set daily from her home in Tennessee (by plane; the drive is over 10 hours). 

The premise was laid out by a 1994 article in Variety, which described the series as having a supernatural element. The show begins when Parton's character is set to open for magicians Siegfried & Roy (whose biopic never came together) in Las Vegas when she is killed. She awakens in the afterlife and is told that she can either go to hell, or return to her hometown and reconnect with her old friends. It seems Betsy used be a sinner and a troublemaker in her youth, and had the nickname of "Hurricane Betsy" (which would have also been a fine title for the series), and she returns and picks up a waitressing gig. (IMDb claims she's subsequently visited by her guardian angel.) The premise was shaped, according to Variety's description, by Stuart Sheslow and Gail Berman.

Shooting in Orlando caused headaches for the producers in L.A. The bigwigs had to tune in via a special satellite link to watch rehearsals, and relied on fax machines to get script pages. The extra headaches brought on by the tech slowed production to a crawl; six episodes of "Heaven to Betsy" were filmed, but it took six months to get them in the can.

The series was intended to be a mid-season replacement during the 1995 TV season on CBS (according to EW), but the series was shelved entirely. No episodes ever aired. The Lost Media Wiki pointed out that a VHS cassette of all six episodes once popped up on eBay, and that the whole show was once leaked online, but it has since been taken down.

The IMDb entry on the series handily lists the plots of four of the six episodes, at any rate. In the pilot, Betsy butts heads with the people who don't believe she had a religious experience. In another, her boss gets a hernia. She interacts with the local church a lot. We can only speculate on the quality of the series.

Also according to the EW article, two of the producers of "Heavens to Betsy" – Jerry Perzigian and Don Seigel, brought in to polish the series — argued constantly over the show's writing, and it seems that the pair actually got into a physical altercation during production. The show, it seems, was constantly being re-written to make the humor sharper. The fight between Perzigian and Seigel, however, delayed production even further, and it was handed off to a new producer, Rick Hawkins. 

The nail was driven into the coffin in a 1995 article in the Los Angeles Times, which finally declared that "Heavens to Betsy" was kaput because of "creative problems." That was it for the series. If you have seen episodes of "Heavens to Betsy," you have seen something very rare indeed.

And that wasn't even Dolly's last foray into sitcoms. Sadly, even less is known about her other unaired pilot, "Mindin' My Own Business," from 1996, which only says on Dolly's website that her character on that show was to be a cook who "found herself in a variety of crazy situations." It, too, is considered lost media.