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:
- Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (season 3)
- Gunsmoke (season 15)
- Bonanza (season 11)
- Mayberry R.F.D. (season 2)
- Family Affair (season 4)
- Here’s Lucy (season 2)
- The Red Skelton Hour (season 19)
- Marcus Welby, M.D. (season 1)
- The Wonderful World of Disney (season 16)
- 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.
You Might Just Blog It After All 