Some final comments before starting the first episode

So I gather Mary Tyler Moore was a household name in her own right before this show came into existence. She was the co-star of the immensely popular Dick Van Dyke Show, which ran for 5 years in the first half the ’60s. She played Laurie Petrie, wife of Van Dyke’s Rob Petrie, a role for which she won an Emmy. She then went on to movies (even sharing the screen with Elvis) before forming her own production company and coming back to TV to produce and star in a show of her own.

It’s pretty easy to catch some Dick Van Dyke Show reruns, as they are still aired fairly regularly on TV Land. I watched a few full episodes, and well, compared to those sitcoms I references in my last post, this show was surprisingly good. The show has legitimate jokes delivered by skilled actors with actual comic timing that accompany interesting enough plot lines. Color me impressed.

The other thing that struck me about The Dick Van Dyke Show was how much better looking Mary Tyler Moore was compared to what I remember of her from her own show. I’m chalking this up to youth (she was on the show from age 24-29 on this show compared to 33-40 on her own show), black-and-white concealing more flaws than color, and style (early ’60s is far enough in the past that at least I can appreciate the style whereas it’s still difficult for me to cut through the tackiness of the ’70s). Regardless, her attractiveness had to be a huge contributing factor to her popularity.

So I assume Moore had a level of celebrity entering the fall of 1970 that starring in a network show in and of itself would not have been revolutionary. And for the audience that would be interested in a sitcom like The Mary Tyler Moore Show that would also be home on a Saturday night, I didn’t see much competition on the schedule. It premiered at 9:30 p.m. on CBS and had 2 other sitcoms as lead-ins. In its time slot, it was up against a crime drama on ABC and a movie of the week on NBC.

It’s not clear that critics knew exactly what the gist of the show was going to be as this blog I found wisely points out, commenting on TV Guide‘s 1970 Fall Preview issue:

[W]hile she dated there was no regular man in her life, and for nearly all of the show’s run there wasn’t one. Of course TV Guide didn’t entirely get the point; in their commentary about the show the magazine said, “She [Mary Tyler Moore] plays Mary Richards, 30-ish, unmarried and getting a little desperate about it.” Trouble is that the show never really made a point of showing Mary as being desperate to get married.

Although mid-way through the first season, it looks like they caught on as demonstrated from this review in the December 1970 issue of Life Magazine:

[T]he really subversive thing  about her show is that she’s over 30 without being either a widow or a nurse…if The Mary Tyler Moore Show ever goes into weekday reruns, vampirized homemakers may get their consciousness raised to the point where they will refuse to leave their brains in the sugar canister any longer.

(If I ever get the chance to further explore the topic of early reaction to the show, there are two books though that do look promising: Moore’s 1996 autobiography After All  and a 1989 retrospective on the making of the show called Love Is All Around. Alas, neither is available on Kindle, in fact, they’re only available from independent sellers on Amazon, so I’ll really going to have to get serious about this blog before I’m waiting 5-7 business days for—and subsequently reading–out-of-print books on the subject.  So depending on how this project shakes out, I may order those books eventually to complement my episode viewing.)

OK, I think it’s time to get on with the show…

Surveying the late-’60s television landscape

Before I tear into 168 episodes of Mary Tyler Moore, I figured I should take a look at the TV scene leading up to its premiere.

Here are the Nielsen Top 10 shows for the season before The Mary Tyler Moore Show aired:

1. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (season 3)
2. Gunsmoke (season 15)
3. Bonanza (season 11)
4. Mayberry R.F.D. (season 2)
5. Family Affair (season 4)
6. Here’s Lucy (season 2)
7. The Red Skelton Hour (season 19)
8. Marcus Welby, M.D. (season 1)
9. The Wonderful World of Disney (season 16)
10. The Doris Day Show (season 2)

The fact that a sketch comedy* show was #1 overall in the ratings really strikes me as odd. That would be unheard of in this day and age. (And by this day and age, I mean for the last 30 years.)

(*) And a very ADD sketch comedy show to boot. They cut to and from scenes–many lasting no longer than a few seconds–in such a rapid-fire manner, that if this show premiered today, some public intellectual would point to it as evidence of the collective shrinking of our attention spans when compared to the long-form sketches of, say, early-’80s SNL.

I’d seen this show before as a kid, probably on Nick at Nite, and until now, always remember it positively. To refresh my memory, I scanned a few YouTube clips. Here’s one from 1968:

This is one of those shows that is so dated that it’s difficult to fairly assess it as a person who was born over 10 years after this episode aired. But none of it was particularly funny.

Again, I’ll give it a partial pass for the datedness effect. Some of the topical stuff had to have been funny 40 years ago. That said I have to believe this exchange, for instance, was just as corny back then as I find it now:

Prisoner 1: [Holding a spoon.]

Prisoner 2: [Grabbing the spoon from Prisoner 1] Hey, where’d you get that?

Prisoner 1: I carved it out of a knife.

*Huge laughter from the audience*

Prisoner 2: You’re not really bright, are you?

Prisoner 1: [Looks at camera] No, I’m dumb.

*Mild laughter from the audience*

Scanning down past Laugh-in in the ratings and a couple of westerns–each in their 2nd decades of existence–comes in 3 straight sitcoms at #4, #5 & #6. And although each one sounds vaguely familiar, I’m not certain I had heard of any of them.

The first of which is Mayberry R.F.D., essentially a continuation of The Andy Griffith Show after Andy Griffith himself left to pursue a movie career.

This was the only show of which I decided to watch an entire episode for the purpose of writing this post. And I’m glad I did. A clip wouldn’t do this thing justice. You’ve got to watch the full 22-minutes to get the gist of it.

I watched the 2nd episode of season 2, entitled “Saving Morelli’s”. This originally aired just about a year before the premiere of Mary Tyler Moore:

After watching this for several minutes, what’s really striking about it is the lack of jokes. Many of today’s sitcoms are just punchline after punchline. Not in this show.

Every so often there’s something that I guess, technically speaking, is supposed to be a joke. But nothing more than something that would illicit only the tiniest of chuckles. For example, in reference to the importance of keeping their favorite restaurant open, the main character(*) quips, “we have to have a place to go on Saturday nights, I mean, it’s either here or the library”.

(*) I recognized him immediately as the guy from Mama’s Family. It’s probably only someone from my generation that would initially identify him as the guy from Mama’s Family.

It’s simply not that the funny of a show in my opinion. If this gets chalked up to datedness, it’s a different type of datedness than Laugh-in. It’s a datedness due to “these aren’t things that pass the bar as things we consider humorous nowadays” as opposed to “I guess that joke was funny during the Vietnam War”.

This show didn’t make it past 3 seasons; however, it wasn’t for lack of ratings. Apparently, sometime in the early ’70s, in an attempt to skew more urban, CBS axed all of the shows with rural settings.

After watching that episode in its entirety, I really didn’t have any attention span left for more full episodes, so I stuck to clips.

The #5 show was Family Affair, which was pretty much like Mayberry R.F.D. but with even less jokes. The only attempts at humor are a few “awe, shucks, aren’t I adorable?” throwaway lines of dialogue from one of the kid actors:

The show has such a quaint feel to it that it’s hard to believe it was on the air as late as the late ’60s. If the show weren’t in color, I guess it was from 1952.

The #6 show, Here’s Lucy, on the other hand feels every bit as ’60s as anything else I’ve seen. I had definitely never heard of this one before. It was Lucille Ball’s 3rd-straight, highly-successful show which capped an astonishing 23-year run of her starring on network television.

I could tell it was supposed to be funny, but again, like Laugh-In, it was very dated and tending more toward the slapsticky stuff. Here’s a clip from an apparently famous episode guest-starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton:

I guess this was the type of show that families could all watch together, and maybe that’s the point. Back then there was probably only one TV in the house, as opposed to multiple TVs, computers & iPads on which each family member consume media individually. So programming like this probably made sense.

After catching glimpses of those 4 shows, I still felt the need to see a little more. So I scanned down past the Nielsen Top 10 and saw some familiar coming in at #18: The Beverly Hillbillies.

I’m not sure why, but this show stands out as more recognizable to someone of my age than anything else on that list. Maybe it was because of the ’90s reboot. I saw that movie with my dad at the theater when I was 14, and I remember him telling me he liked the show when he was a kid.

After watching a little bit of it on YouTube, a couple things stood out to me. One, as familiar as I am with the concept of The Beverly Hillbillies, I realize I may have never seen one second of this TV show until the moment I watched these YouTube clips. And two, this show is ridiculous:

Not intentionally ridiculous in a manner that could garner critical praise like 30 Rock or It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. But ridiculous in a way that I bet it got panned critically. Now, I’ve pretty much hit my limit in doing research for this post so I’m not gonna to try to hard to verify this, but let’s say my suspicions were somewhat confirmed via the show’s Wikipedia page by the “Popularity” section of the entry beginning with the phrase “Written-off as lowbrow by some critics…”.

So based on my far-from-comprehensive research, Mary Tyler Moore was probably gonna feel different than what was popular at the time.

Why I’m doing this

The title of this blog is more than just a clever entirely predictable play on the famous line from the show’s theme song. It’s also me talking to myself, addressing the fact that after countless failed attempts at sticking to a writing routine, I may just have stumbled upon a blog topic that helps me get my reps in(*).

(*) Not sure where I first heard this concept of “getting your reps in” used in a non-sports sense, but it definitely applies to me and writing. Just like a quarterback trying to learn a new system, anyone trying to get better at anything needs practice. I want to get better at writing, and I’m not enrolling in an MFA program anytime soon, so my best bet is to get my writing reps in any form I can.

Hadn’t thought about The Mary Tyler Moore Show in years. I used to watch it on summer nights with my mom in the mid-’90s (when the Pirate game wasn’t on KBL of course). Of all the old sitcoms reruns I was introduced to by my mom or Nick at Nite, MTM was my favorite.

But last week the series premiere of HBO’s Girls(*) made a passing reference was made to the main characters falling asleep to a MTM rerun. And those fond Nick at Nite memories came rushing back.

(*) I had read so much about the creator of this show (she’s done so much at such a young age!) in the build-up to its premiere, that my subconscious receptors were probably open to inspiration.  

So that inspired me to look the show up on YouTube. I picked a random episode from the 3rd or 4th season. I don’t remember having seen it before, and that got me thinking. I probably haven’t seen a lot of these episodes. I should go back and watch this show from the beginning rather than watch episodes at random.

Well, they made 168 episodes. 24 per season for 7 years, 1970 to 1977.

Not only should I go back and watch these–I could blog them. I like TV and stuff from the ’70s, so watching these shows could inspire me to explore a whole host of topics and angles to write about.

The important thing is the writing. I really don’t care what I’m writing about right now, I just need to get myself to write.

Gotta get my reps in.