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…
You Might Just Blog It After All 