The first Jewish single lady on TV beat ‘Monday Night Football’ in ratings
Rhoda was a groundbreaking gal for primetime
Rhoda Morgenstern was TV’s original tough cookie. When she burst on the scene in 1970, there was truly no other female character like her. She had doe eyes and a bouncy brown bob, but her prettiness was offset by her thick Bronx accent, eye-catching, bohemian fashion sense, and dry wit. She was edgy, funny, and quick, and to many Americans who hadn’t yet seen their realities represented on prime time like, she heralded a welcome change.
By the time she had her own show, most viewers already knew Rhoda. Among the many charms of the quirky 1970s television classic The Mary Tyler Moore Show, she was perhaps the most entertaining. On that show she played Mary’s boldly dressed, bawdy, wisecracking neighbor and best friend. A single Jewish artist, the weight-obsessed, man-obsessed Rhoda was appealingly neurotic and often hilarious. Through the characters of Mary and her friends, The Mary Tyler Moore Show became famous for introducing America to the modern working woman. It boldly dealt with issues rarely if ever before represented in sitcoms, from income inequality to infidelity to prostitution to homosexuality. And the character of Rhoda offered an acerbic running commentary on it all.
Four years into her run on Moore’s show, Rhoda — played by Valerie Harper —was so loved she got her own spinoff, which aired for five seasons. The pilot episode became the first television program to score a number-one Nielsen rating, displacing even Monday Night Football.
The credits for the 1974 debut season, begin with a voiceover in Rhoda’s thick New York accent. The character announces matter of factly that she was born in the Bronx in 1941. “I’ve always felt responsible for World War II,” she continues. “The first thing I remember liking that liked me back was food. In school, my grades were okay, mostly Bs and Cs, except for self-control.” She says she went to art school —“my entrance exam was on a book of matches” — and then moved to chilly Minneapolis before returning home. “New York,” the credits end, “this is your last chance!”
The New York Rhoda returns to is more punishing than she remembered. It’s busy, crowded, and tiring, and the housing market is dismal. (Sound familiar, Lena Dunham?) In the second episode of Season 1, Rhoda is looking for an apartment. “We used to read the obituaries to find apartments,” she recalls to her younger sister Brenda (Julie Kavner), who she’s crashing with. “Now if someone coughs, you follow them around…” Rhoda goes to a real estate broker (played by Henry Winkler), who tells her a nice one-bedroom with a terrace will cost $900 a month, plus a $150 cleaning fee. Rhoda replies, “I can only afford to move into the cleaning fee.” The broker laughs, then turns sleazy, and suggestively offers Rhoda a better deal if she’s willing to do him a favor. She essentially laughs in his face, and then slams the door on it. Shortly thereafter, she reluctantly moves back in with her parents.
In the 1970s, sitcoms were beginning to tackle social issues, moving away from saccharine family programs centered on innocuous and absurd domestic squabbles. Shows like The Jeffersons, Good Times, and Maude presumed more socially engaged viewers, and took on race, class, and gender. Rhoda did too, not least because the character was the first female Jewish lead in a sitcom. As Vincent Brook writes in Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom, Morgenstern was a “dark-complected, nasal-inflected Jewish Woman in Search of Marriage.” (Harper herself was not Jewish, but maintained that her career didn’t blossom until later because the culture and TV execs “were into Sandra Dee types, and I was dark.”). She had cranky but loving, overprotective parents, and a neurotic, insecure sister. Still, the portrayal of urban single Jewish womanhood was itself novel, and the character of Rhoda was surprisingly and refreshingly complex.
Early in the second season, Rhoda, by this point married, goes to Tarrytown to pick up her stepson and finally meets Marion, her husband’s ex-wife. Marion is a frosty, patrician blond who floats through her well-appointed, all-beige house in a cream pantsuit complaining about how hard it is to find good help. Rhoda, in a moment of wine-fueled honesty, tells Marion how nervous she was about their meeting. “I have all these insecurities,” she says. “I mean, a girl like you has always intimidated a girl like me. That’s the truth. All my life I’ve had to fight very hard, you know, to overcome those fears.” The audience laughs big at the ex-wife’s nonchalant reply (“Yeah…I can understand that”), but as a comment about class and ethnic insecurity—maybe even a comment specifically about Jewishness in America—it’s the kind of surprising, earnest moment that made the show quietly groundbreaking.
Rhoda peddled a feel-good feminism — a single, street-smart, self-reliant girl making her way in the big city—but it also got pretty real about sexism. There were plenty of male characters like the real estate broker and, as on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, plenty of limitations to being taken seriously for pretty young women. But there was also Joe Gerard, Rhoda’s love interest. Joe, played by David Groh, was a warm, kind-hearted, and funny Italian-Catholic contractor who fell in love with Rhoda in the first few episodes. Their relationship was traditional, and full of the kind of comical ball-busting viewers had come to expect. She moved in with him late in the first season of the show, and the couple eventually wed. Their wedding in October 1974 was an epic television event watched by 52 million viewers. According to Parade magazine, “an endless stream of wedding gifts from engraved plates to toasters (along with thousands of “Congratulations Rhoda and Joe” cards) poured into CBS studios.” As Harper put it, “the audience felt as if a family member were getting married.” (She also won an Emmy that year.)
Once married and a housewife, Rhoda gets bored. She starts her own window-dressing business, but still she’s restless. After two years of matrimony, the couple separates, then divorces. The divorce was bold by 1970s standards, especially in light of the fact that on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda had been singularly obsessed with finding a man and settling down. But the producers of the show thought “wedded bliss was simply boring for a character who had always been interesting for her ‘underdog’ status as a single woman,” writes Bonnie J. Dow in Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement. It was a daring move, but one in line with the changing times. “That Rhoda’s separation was a ploy to improve ratings in 1976,” Dow continues, “shows how far television had come in six years.” The plot line also enabled the show to take on the still-stigmatized topic of female dating after 35.
But it wasn’t just its social relevance or button-pushing that kept viewers engaged for 109 episodes. It was largely Rhoda’s relatability that made the show a success. Her sharp repartee with her drunk doorman Carlton, frank conversations about romantic misadventures with her sister Brenda, and eye rolling tolerance of her overbearing parents, made for laugh-out-loud viewing. But Rhoda was at her core a genuine and deeply loving character who was trying—and often failing—to figure out the art of “adulting” before that term was even a thing.
