100 Favorite Shows: #81 — The Mary Tyler Moore Show
“What is a family anyway? They’re just people who make you feel less alone and really loved.”
Series like Laverne & Shirley may have captured the popular attention of television in the 1970s, but it was The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s model that pushed the medium into a newer, richer, more daring zone. Following the iconic success of Mary Tyler Moore through her performance on The Dick Van Dyke Show, CBS executives managed to convince Moore to return to television and head up her own series. What resulted was a workplace comedy from James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, distinctly focused on feminism in the workplace. Moore played Mary Richards, an ambitious, single (not divorced, as execs feared television audiences wouldn’t grasp that Laura Petrie was only a character for Moore) woman who was best friends with Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper) and worked her way up at Minneapolis’ WJM news team. Anchoring the news was Ted Baxter (Ted Knight), supported by producer Lou Grant (Edward Asner) and head writer Murray Slaughter (Gavin MacLeod). Debuting in 1970 and spanning seven seasons of critical acclaim, The Mary Tyler Moore Show concluded in 1977 with a rich lineage awaiting the future of television.
(You’ll find spoilers for The Mary Tyler Moore Show in this essay if you haven’t culturally absorbed them by now anyway.)
The early days of American television were based on wholesome characters and quaint situations, the sort that would be palatable for the average viewer and wouldn’t require much critical thinking or remind audiences of the real world they sought to escape. It took a long time before television became the medium of Larry Sanders mocking Hank Kingsley with vulgarity or Tony Soprano loading up a gun for begrudging vengeance. But in 1970, the change began, little by little, with each episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Yes, there were characters before Mary Tyler Moore that weren’t paragons of perfection on television. Fred on I Love Lucy was a curmudgeon. Mel on The Dick Van Dyke Show was a bit of a pushover. But on Mary Tyler Moore, each character had deep flaws baked into their characters’ personas, even if the figures portrayed were largely worthy of audiences’ support and rooting.
Lou Grant was an introverted grump who wanted nothing to do with the wholesome sincerity or spunk of Mary. (He was also a divorced character with top billing, which was revolutionary for the medium on a micro-scale, just as Mary’s status as a single woman was initially seminal.) Murray was aggressively sarcastic, rather than being a winking joke machine à la Buddy on Dick Van Dyke. The parsimonious Ted Baxter depicted an underlying vanity in the country’s most trusted profession: the news anchor. Rhoda embraced a tough exterior that masked her inner insecurity, a dynamic that launched her as one of the medium’s most complex characters, at the time. Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White), the host of a fictional program — “The Happy Homemaker” on WJM — was sexually promiscuous and ceaselessly two-faced.
Even Phyllis (Cloris Leachman, in a Caroline Appleby from Lucy-esque role) and Georgette (Georgia Engel), who were more traditional sitcom characters, filled out a deep, regularly recurring ensemble that was also new to television (most of the time, four leads and a guest star were the way to go. Some shows even went smaller than that, like Daryl Morey’s strategy on the Houston Rockets). This parade of abrasive characters were juxtaposed expertly against Mary’s hopeful, determined persona; they were the antidote to her characterization, which drove the series. It’s the sort of bubbly optimism we’d later see in protagonists on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (a woman moving to a new city) and the sort of platonic workplace antagonism that would be present on 30 Rock. For its time, though, The Mary Tyler Moore Show stood alone.
Furthermore, MTM’s depiction of a single woman conquering the workplace and attempting to “have it all” (Mary did date a few men along the seven seasons) led to later progressive, women-driven comedies like The Mindy Project and Parks and Recreation. At the core of it, The Mary Tyler Moore was a thoughtful, forward-thinking comedy that aimed to liberate large swaths of its audience.
One of the most liberating aspects of The Mary Tyler Moore Show was the recurring joke about Mary’s inability to throw a successful party, which would’ve been considered blasphemy even months prior to MTM’s early sitcom premises. It’s a feminist foible within Mary Richards that is most prominently presented in the season four episode, “The Dinner Party.”
In the installment, directed by Jay Sandrich, Mary is immediately flustered at the thought of hosting a party for Congresswoman Margaret Geddes (Irene Tedrow), whom she met in a producing capacity. It features the classic sitcom synopsis of having one character keep a secret from her guest (in this case, it’s Mary doing her best to keep her domestic ineptitude under wraps) and throwing in a fun bit player with his own baggage (Henry Winkler as Steve Waldman, Rhoda’s party date, who was just fired from his job and is eventually exiled from the dinner table). However, it also inverts its core premise by siccing the main characters of MTM on Mary’s desperate attempt to host the party smoothly.
She’s already tasked with limiting the dinner party to six guests (all her table can fit) when each of her coworkers presumptively attempts to invite themselves along (Sue Ann, who times six Veal Prince Orloff dishes for 8:00 P.M. sharp, doesn’t even question the opportunity to force her way into Mary’s home for the night) for the event or guilt Mary into including them. (The main guilt offender is Ted, whose presence is opposed by Lou. Ted leans heavily into pathetic persuasion, regaling Mary with stories of a tumultuous childhood to hopefully earn a spot at the party.) When compounding Mary’s lack of party-throwing skill with her colleagues’ proclivity for taking advantage of her naivete, the party winds up as an unmitigated disaster — the type that sees dessert usurped by more “pity me” stories from Ted.
“Tonight’s the big party for the Minneapolis Six,” he quips to her before beginning his assault on her kindness and guilt to get himself invited to her party. It’s a method of preying upon these feelings within Mary, but it’s only done in the name of pettiness. Ted, Lou, and Sue Ann jockey for an invite to Mary’s party for the sole purpose of feeling superior to those who wouldn’t be invited. They don’t care about the stress Mary’s under or the inclusion of Congresswoman Geddes. All they care about is bragging rights. And Mary just hates to say no.
As we see in “The Dinner Party,” though, MTM was always capable of depicting more realistic scenarios (as opposed to highly heightened — and slightly absurd — sitcoms), perhaps in a sense to prompt more viewers to be comfortable with their own shortcomings. It might feel like solace and, perhaps, unity for viewers who were also not deft at throwing parties. Suddenly, they had a kindred spirit in Mary Richards. Sometimes, our friends and coworkers just take advantage of us, after all.
This wasn’t all that was liberating about The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Characters are openly referred to as “gay,” birth control is the subject of “You’ve Got a Friend,” equality for women on myriad issues are presented. The 1970s were a decade of change and MTM was one of the television series that best represented this. Granted, much of the work occurred in baby steps and, occasionally, throwaway lines for Mary, but there were also behind the scenes efforts (writers included Jenna McMahon, Susan Silver, and Charlotte Brown, among others). Writers who could pen lines like Mary’s from “Divorce Isn’t Everything,” “I am changing my clothes at eight o’clock at night so that I can go to a club where I’m going to lie about being divorced so that I can perhaps — in a few months’ time — end up in Paris speaking Spanish.” Lines like those spoke to Mary Richards and the monuments of change that pushed her to the front of the television landscape.
The issues touched upon throughout The Mary Tyler Moore Show were not solely limited to social progress. Sometimes, episodes revolved around the dusting off of a previously taboo topic and an open dialogue surrounding it. Take the iconic episode (and one widely regarded as one of television’s best) from season six, “Chuckles Bites the Dust.”
The episode centers around the famous (in their universe) clown, Chuckles, who died after a confrontation with a circus elephant (perhaps a different lesson exists there, too). Because of this slightly misanthropic nature to many of the MTM characters, though, Chuckles the Clown’s death is met with joke after joke from the station workers (referring to the funeral’s attendees as “the more, the merrier” or the allusion of “requiem for a peanut”). The only one who’s opposed is Mary, who reflects on how many young television viewers must have felt when the loss of life is met solely with humor. This was a time before Patch Adams, after all, and the fact that MTM sarcastically joked about death in the first place was a massive deal for the medium and for American culture, as a whole.
Mary’s reluctance to joke about the loss of Chuckles culminates in one of the most iconic TV sequences of all-time. In attendance at Chuckles’ funeral, the WJM team reacts to the eulogy from Reverend Burns (John Harkins) stoically, but it ends up being Mary who is forced to stifle laughter as the priest lobs nonsense word after nonsense word in memory of Chuckles and his life of kooky characters and silly symphonies. “Remember Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo’s little catchphrase?” he asks. “Remember how when his arch rival Señor Caboom would hit him with the giant cucumber and knock him down? Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo would always pick himself up, dust himself off and say, ‘I hurt my foo-foo.’”
The chuckling from Mary is noticeable to all in attendance, but only is picked up by Burns when he remarks, “What did Chuckles ask in return? Not much. In his own words: ‘A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.’” A full guffaw emanates from Mary Richards (Moore is pitch-perfect in this scene with each stifle of laughter coming across completely authentically. She was an astounding performer in all respects), but it ends up being encouraged by the reverend. He insists that Chuckles wanted his life to stand for laughter, not tears.
It’s a moment that’s reckoning with death (and our reaction to it). After the funeral, Lou (ahead of Frank Reynolds) says that his dead body is better off in a trashcan. Sue Ann wishes to have her ashes scattered against Robert Redford. Ted insists on a classy affair for his own parting. However, despite the discussion, the episode also reckons with life and what a life means to the people left behind once it ends. We see the insistence that Chuckles’ life was meant to spread laughter, not sadness, as if his funeral would rank in the echelon of those for Walt Disney or Jim Henson or Mr. Rogers. That the joy they brought to the world outweighs the sadness left behind without them being in it.
However, we also see Georgette remark that funerals come too late and that we take people for granted. They should be celebrated while they’re alive and not when they’re dead and unable to see just how many people cared about them by attending their funerals. The lines from Georgette are played for laughter, but they have a solemn truth to them. So even if the sentiment of embracing life while we can and honoring death as we should (with more life) is lost in favor of Mary’s laughing fit, it’s still a sentiment introduced to the television landscape as a mini-revolution of sorts. It pushed us a little bit closer to a more idealized world.
That’s what The Mary Tyler Moore Show always did. It was extensively curmudgeonly and sarcastic, but it still ends with Mary’s insistence that her work colleagues became her family by the end, simply because of how she felt better when she was around them. Her spirit was never crushed by their grumpiness, arrogance, or hypocrisy. In fact, she made them a little bit better along the way — a little bit better having known Mary Richards. Throughout the laughs, dances, and seltzer in the pants, the same was true for us. For those dances, The Mary Tyler Moore Show set the tempo; the symphony goes on — we’re gonna make it after all.
