Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (46 page)

When it eventually aired in 2000,
Time
pronounced it “ultimately disappointing,” though it called Moore “still one of the most brilliant and sadly underutilized comedic actresses around.”
Variety
had mixed feelings as well. “
Rhoda, you haven’t changed a bit,” a review said. “The sarcasm, the wishy-washiness, the inner-turmoil surrounding a mother-daughter relationship—it’s still boiling over and inviting as ever. Mary, you’re a whole lot harder to write for, and attempting to put a few scars on the smile that turned everyone on is a tricky proposition.” The
San Francisco Chronicle
had harsher words still: “
Mary and Rhoda
is to be savored, ever so briefly, for its reunion of Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern. And then it should be spat out like sour
milk, in hopes of preserving the happier memory of Mary and Rhoda in their 1970s sitcom heaven.”

How could anything—even if it starred Mary and Rhoda themselves—live up to the memory of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
? Perhaps, as that review suggested, the series was better left to hall-of-fame reminiscences. Then again, maybe
Mary Tyler Moore
itself had helped to advance television so much that a safe, by-the-numbers revival failed to live up to its legacy. Not long after
Mary and Rhoda
aired, the spirit of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
experienced a renaissance of sorts. When those who grew up watching
Mary Tyler Moore
started making television themselves, a new golden age—in television, and particularly television comedy made by women—dawned.

The fact that tributes to
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
materialized with ever more frequency in the years to follow was no coincidence. In the mid-1990s, just as ’70s nostalgia was reaching a peak among the Baby Boomers who lived through the decade, a new generation discovered the show when kids’ network Nickelodeon added it to its popular Nick at Nite lineup of classic sitcoms. In 1998,
Entertainment Weekly
named it the
best TV show of all time. In 2002, cable network TV Land sponsored a Mary Richards statue to be built in the spot where she famously tossed her beret on Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis. That same year, CBS ran yet another reunion special, with a lengthy tribute to Knight. In 2006, Moore made a guest appearance on
That ’70s Show,
which happened to be filmed in the old
Mary Tyler Moore
studio. The sitcom proudly gave her back her old dressing room for the weeks she was there.

Still more hints of a
Mary Tyler Moore
resurgence came in 2009, with the massive comeback of Betty White. At the age of eighty-seven, the television veteran made a sudden succession of scene-stealing appearances: first, in the romantic comedy
The Proposal,
then in a Snickers commercial that premiered during the 2010 Super Bowl, and finally in an online petition drive to get her to host
Saturday Night Live
. She
topped it off with a new show,
Hot in Cleveland,
and a special tribute from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Her
Mary Tyler Moore
costars all showed up to salute her, with MacLeod declaring her a “national treasure.” When the two hugged later, she told him, “You’ll have to forgive me for being so overexposed.” He quipped, “Honey, you’ve always been overexposed.”

Cloris Leachman experienced a parallel rebirth in Hollywood, first gaining attention as a 2008 contestant on
Dancing with the Stars,
then playing a grandma whose dementia garners laughs on Fox’s edgy comedy
Raising Hope
. She even appeared on the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, joking about how everyone kept confusing her with Betty White.

Ed Asner continued to score a ludicrous amount of work for an actor in his eighties, guest-starring on White’s
Hot in Cleveland,
ABC’s sitcom
The Middle,
and USA Network’s
Royal Pains
. He played financier Warren Buffett in HBO’s film
Too Big to Fail;
he toured the country doing a one-man show about FDR; and he voiced the lead character in the Oscar-nominated animated film
Up
in 2009.

What’s amazing is that so many of the best minds in the business still cite
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
as their inspiration, and their benchmark for greatness. The
Onion
’s AV Club website declared in 2010 that “
All in the Family
and
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
are among the handful of TV series that altered the medium so profoundly that it can be divided roughly into periods before and after their arrival . . . . both would change the face of television radically and influence virtually every television comedy up through the present.” True enough, its influence goes beyond simply bringing single women into the sitcom sphere. Its dedication to realism—death and divorce were real and possible in its world, unlike the comedies that came before it—made way for real stakes on television, even in comedy. Whether it was Mr. Hooper dying on
Sesame Street,
Coach dying on
Cheers,
or everyone dying on
The Sopranos, The Mary Tyler Moore Show
did it first. The
fact that bad things could happen in its world didn’t turn viewers off; it only made them even more invested in its characters, large and small.

Similarly, the revelation that a show could combine the melancholy with the comedic reverberates throughout more recent shows, including
The Office, Louie,
even
The Simpsons
. Power ensembles such as those on
Friends
and
Seinfeld
show how wise it was for Moore to surround herself with talent, rather than keeping the spotlight on herself.

At the same time, Mary Richards’s cultural daughters were multiplying on the airwaves like never before in a new wave of single, professional female comedy heroines. In 2006,
Saturday Night Live
’s Tina Fey—its first female head writer—got her own sitcom,
30 Rock,
and
deliberately structured it like a funhouse-mirror version of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Her character, Liz Lemon, works in television and struggles to balance her work and personal lives, but work always wins. (That part is very Mary Richards. The fact that Liz is also a slob who loves junk food and struggles to find appropriate dates is less so.) Her primary relationship is with the gruff network boss played by Alec Baldwin. She’s surrounded by characters even crazier than she is. And she represents single women of the era perfectly—there is something painfully relatable about a woman who’s great at her job but can’t control her sub sandwich and white wine habits or maintain a romantic connection.

Throughout the first season, Fey taught herself to write sitcoms—rather than the freer form of sketch comedy in which she was well trained—by watching DVDs of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. She and her fellow writers talked about the show all the time, particularly the way it focused on the relationships among colleagues who happened to make a TV show for a living. Like Brooks and Burns before her, the married Fey deferred to her single writers on story lines exploring Liz Lemon’s dating life.

The show, in one way, surpassed even
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s first season: It won an Emmy for Best Comedy Series. In the next few
years, Fey’s popularity soared, even though her show got only 5.4 million viewers per week in its first season—less than a fifth of what
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
once got, a testament to the changes in the media and entertainment landscape since then. Nonetheless, Fey’s success spawned a new era in which funny women starred in and created more shows than they ever had before—the next few years’ media coverage felt a lot like the heights of lady-writer-mania that
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
inspired (minus the hot pants).

Grey’s Anatomy,
created by Shonda Rhimes, focused on a core cast of prickly female doctors;
Ugly Betty
celebrated the life of a gawky girl from Queens working at a fashion magazine. By 2011, the TV schedule boasted so many Mary Richards acolytes that it had reached what one male sitcom producer griped was “peak vagina”: Among the biggest breakouts of the season were Zooey Deschanel in
New Girl,
a show about a lovable single girl living with three guys, created by writer Liz Meriwether; and
2 Broke Girls,
created by comic Whitney Cummings and following the adventures of a modern-day (and much raunchier) Mary and Rhoda. Even TV’s edgier and quirkier heroines showed shades of Mary Richards.
Parks and Recreation
’s Hillary Clinton–worshipping, small-town government wonk Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) is just your basic single girl trying to make it.
Nurse Jackie
(played by Edie Falco) has a workplace full of goofballs, an acerbic best friend, and a less-than-perfect love life; she just also happens to have a pill-popping problem and a disintegrating marriage.

Then, in 2012, as
30 Rock
prepared its predetermined final season—its seventh, like
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
—we got a glimpse of the next generation of Mary Richardses. At just twenty-six, Lena Dunham created HBO’s
Girls,
which follows an aspiring writer in Brooklyn and her cringingly realistic exploits with boys, booze, drugs, and sometimes, even, jobs. The premiere had critics panting about “the next
Sex and the City
” and stoked deafening media buzz. The first episode pointedly referenced
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
as if to point out both its similarities—single girl takes on city!—as well
as its stark differences—Mary Richards would likely blanch over the flagrant nudity, raw sex scenes, and coarse language.

These days, those female-centric shows have one thing
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
never did, nor could have: a woman running the show
and
starring in it. Thanks to the work of Treva Silverman, Susan Silver, Pat Nardo, Gloria Banta, and others, Fey, Dunham, and their ilk have the chance to write their own words. Fey watches
Mary Tyler Moore
to stoke her creativity when she writes. Dunham looks to Rhoda as a role model;
Seinfeld
’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus says the same of Mary. “
I love Mary Tyler Moore and, of course, Lucille Ball, too,” Louis-Dreyfus said while playing the neurotic Elaine Benes on the ’90s hit. “But Mary was more accessible. I liked her because she was funny, and she was feminine. She didn’t compromise her femininity to be humorous, which is an easy trap for women to fall into.” Rhimes says
Mary Tyler Moore
is among her top TV influences of all time. “There was something about the humor,” she says, “but it was also really moving.”

Mary Richards was so real to so many, it’s easy to imagine her still living her life today. But what we imagine her doing says more about us—and what she meant to us—than it does about her.
Mary Tyler Moore
writer Pat Nardo imagines Mary Richards as an executive, unmarried and childless. Her writing partner, Gloria Banta, agrees. “I think she’d be head of a nonprofit because she was such a good person.” Susan Silver has no doubt: “Plastic surgery. That’s what Mary would be doing right now.” Silver also figures Mary is divorced, and grappling with the same questions she finds herself facing every day. “Are we still visible, women after a certain age? And where are all the men? And how do we age gracefully?” She adds, “The answer to all of that is plastic surgery.” Silver wishes Mary were still around—and on television, where she belongs, continuing to make life better for her cohorts. “There is life between fifty and eighty,” she says. “But it’s not on television. I think Mary would be trying to fix that.”

Or perhaps she’d just be happy to relax into her later years, knowing she’d changed the lives of millions of people in a million different
ways. She gave Treva Silverman a female character worth writing for. She launched the careers of dozens of female comedy writers. She brought the words and humor of Jim Brooks and Allan Burns to as many people as possible. She gave Joe Rainone five double-spaced pages of inspiration every week for seven years. And she gave everyone who watched the unexpected laughs and tears they had come to expect. Not bad for a single girl from Roseburg, Minnesota.