Mary and the Bear

It was the long, dark days of the pandemic that introduced me to the pleasures of watching television. Desperate for entertainment, I turned to cable-tv for long-running recent series I’d missed, like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, but also for sitcoms that took me back to my early years.

 After giving some love to I Love Lucy, I settled on the pleasures of The Mary Tyler Moore show, which ruled the airwaves from 1970 until 1977. The show may look dated today, with its multi-camera style and laugh-happy studio audience. But back in the 1970s it was known for tackling social issues that were very much in the air. Its star, as Mary Richards, was an unmarried career gal who had the occasional romance but was much more involved with her job as the producer of a local Minneapolis TV news show. In the early seasons, she had colorful interactions with her landlady (Cloris Leachman) and her best buddy (Valerie Harper). But most episodes featured her interactions with the newsroom gang, the curmudgeonly Lou Grant (Edward  Asner), the acerbic Murray Slaughter (Gavin McLeod), and the irresistibly pompous newscaster Ted Baxter (Ted Knight). The cherry on top in later years was the frequent presence of Betty White as a man-hungry TV personality known as the Happy Homemaker.

 Though the series was played for laughs, at times it  ventured boldly onto serious topics, like infidelity, divorce, erectile dysfunction, and even death. (The “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode is a comedy classic, in which Mary struggles to avoid laughing at a death that occurs under bizarre circumstances..) 

 Network television seasons were long back then: 24 episodes of this show aired per year. There was occasional follow-through: in season 4, Lou’s wife walks out on him to find herself. Several seasons later, she’s remarrying, and Lou and Mary reluctantly attend the nuptials. But basically the episodes are self-contained: the contents of one show generally do not carry over to the next. This ends up being particularly weird at the end of the next-to-last season, when Ted and new wife Georgette, despairing of having a baby, adopt a polite seven-year-old boy who charms everyone in the news room. The kicker is that Georgette then discovers that, against all odds, she’s pregnant. When the show resumes the following season, Georgette is in the throes of giving birth during a party at Mary’s apartment. But that cute little adoptee is never mentioned. Did he run away? Did they return him to the agency?

 All this comes to mind because we’ve just finished watching the first season of Hulu’s The Bear. Like The Mary Tyler Moore Show it’s an Emmy winner in the field of comedy, though it lacks anything you might call a joke. Inside of being performed in front of a live audience, this story about the running of a Chicago neighborhood restaurant is shot in cinéma vérité style, with the overlapping dialogue coming thick and fast, and home audience struggling to understand everything that’s said. (The show also consistently relies on expletives that Mary Richards has doubtless never used, or even heard.)

 If The Mary Tyler Moore Show occasionally edges into darker territory, The Bear lives there fulltime. Its characters cope with the aftermath of addiction and a brother’s suicide, and shady hangers-on are always lurking around. Funny? I’m not so sure. (Neither are the Emmy voters who chose a different winner in this category for The Bear’s second season.) But the ongoing story—which doesn’t fully come together until the last episode of season 1--is fascinating, and well worth watching. 

                     

Striking Out: The Writers' Guild of America and The Mary Tyler Moore Show

The pandemic introduced me to the pleasures of vegging out on the couch most evenings to watch the best in television. It’s allowed me to catch up, belatedly, on now-classic series like Breaking Bad and newer ones like Inventing Anna. But at times I’m looking for something nostalgic and easy on the eyes. Often the passage of time creates a disconnect: my once-beloved Carol Burnett Show seems to me now a bit grotesquely out of date, though its classic movie parodies still give me a chuckle. Still, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977) is an amiable, and sometimes hilarious, way to spend 30 minutes with some deeply flawed but lovable characters.

 I think of this show, about a single gal working for a Minneapolis TV news station, as pretty much pure escapism. But a second-season episode (one of the funniest I can recall) reminded me of issues that are in the news right now. It’s all about fallout from a writers’ strike, which briefly decimates the newsroom in which Mary is the Gal Friday to curmudgeonly Lou Grant (Edward Asner). Mary and Lou are officially Management, so they must stay behind when their show’s news writers walk off the job and join the picket lines. Doofus announcer Ted Knight (as Ted Baxter) is dumbfounded by all the issues involved, but his performers’ union requires him to leave too. So Lou and Mary are put in the position of trying both to write the news copy and present it on air. It doesn’t work: Mary’s attempt to put a bit of drama into a weather story is ridiculously ill-considered, and Lou – as on-air presenter – turns out to have a galloping case of stage fright that only a lot of scotch will cure. Fortunately the strike only lasts two days, and everyone lives happily ever after.

 Too bad things don’t end so neatly in the real world. Members of the Writers’ Guild of America (who work in both film and television) are now on strike for real, desperate to improve their take-home pay in an era when TV is dominated by streaming services. In contrast to the big TV networks of old, Netflix and the other streamers notoriously pay only modest wages to staff writers. Nor do they offer the healthy residuals on which writers have long counted as a way to shore up a middle-class lifestyle.

 It doesn’t stop there. As aggrieved writers are quick to point out, studios won’t even discuss another elephant in the room: the advent of ChatGPT as a threat to the writing profession. We all know that writing for movies and TV often tends to rely on well-known formulas. As pointed out in a recent report in The Hollywood Reporter, what’s to stop studio heads from turning to Artificial Intelligence to plan new episodes of old shows?  Said Amy Webb, founder and CEO of something called the Future Today Institute, a long-running procedural like Law & Order could easily make use of ChatGPT for plotting out episodes, then bring in a human writer only to shape and polish. It’s a possibility that WGA members are desperate to hash out with Management, but Management won’t commit.

 As a teacher of screenwriting I know how many “civilians” are out there, hoping to make it as writers in Hollywood. But Hollywood professionals know how easy it is to get cheated out of a living wage.  My former boss Roger Corman would habitually ask an office drone to throw together a first draft over a weekend, then pay a professional only for a rewrite. Have things changed so very much?

 

Tears and Chuckles in the Newsroom: Ed Asner Bites the Dust

It’s been a tough year for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The workplace sitcom, set mostly in the newsroom of a Minneapolis TV station, ran from 1970 to 1977. For me it was essential viewing, as part of a Saturday night CBS comedy line-up. Though not nearly as in-your-face outrageous as 1971’s All in the Family and some of the sitcoms that followed, Mary Tyler Moore contributed to an adult kind of comedy by focusing on a young single woman more focused on her career than on her marital prospects. The show’s most endearing trait, though, was its well-established sense of camaraderie between Mary and her newsroom pals, whose interactions would seem familiar to anyone who’s ever toiled in an office setting. The grumpy boss; the eager assistant; the sardonic sidekick; the social climber; the doofus who somehow succeeds beyond everyone else’s expectations: all of these familiar types make their appearance on the show. But they’re more than simply caricatures: talented writer/creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns make them real, complex individuals (well, maybe aside from smarmy news anchor Ted Baxter, who gives egotism a bad name). And, from all accounts, the actors playing these roles happily worked together to produce, week after week, can’t-miss TV.

 But 2021 has hardly been kind to the Mary Tyler Moore alumni. Over the years, many of the eight regulars passed away, starting with Ted Knight (much acclaimed for playing popinjay Ted Baxter) dying of cancer back in 1986, and the radiant Mary herself succumbing to illness in 2017. Two years later, we lost Valerie Harper, who was unforgettably acerbic as Mary’s lovelorn pal, Rhoda. But 2021 saw the demise of three of the series’ stars. In January it was Cloris Leachman, hilariously neurotic as the narcissistic Phyllis Lindstrom, but also an Oscar-winning dramatic actress (for The Last Picture Show). February brought the death of Gavin MacLeod, who played perennial office wiseacre Murray Slaughter, then went on to other good-guy TV roles. And, of course, last week it was everyone’s favorite newsroom boss, the crusty but fundamentally tender-hearted Lou Grant, played by the invaluable Edward Asner. Asner had a long run as Lou Grant, both on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and later heading up a serious take on newspaper journalism, called simply Lou Grant (1977-1982). So closely was Asner identified with this role that when he appeared in other dramatic contexts, as in the 1977 miniseries Roots, you couldn’t help wondering why in the world Lou Grant was commanding a slave ship.

 Like all other fans, I have my favorite episodes. One is the much-acclaimed “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” in which a local TV clown has dressed up as a peanut for a local parade, only to be mauled to death by a confused elephant. The heart of episode takes place at Chuckles’ funeral, where the staff of WJM desperately try to keep from laughing at the whole tragic but absurd situation.  But in tribute to Ed Asner, I just watched the series’ last two episodes. In one, Mary and Lou try – at long last – to get romantic, but quickly realize that their work relationship makes courtship impossible. The very last show of all highlights the dispersal  of the WJM team after an ownership change and mass firing. The valiantly unsentimental Lou can’t help blurting out, “I treasure you people.” Personally, I feel the same way.

 Kudos to sole survivor Betty White. She’s 99 now: may she continue to live long and prosper. Right now I don’t want to lose any more of the show’s alumni.

 

 

 

Valerie Harper: Savory Ham on Rye?

Who could resist Valerie Harper? At the start of the 1970s, on the always hilarious Mary Tyler Moore Show, she was Rhoda Morgenstern, the best buddy whose self-deprecating wit and funky style made for a vivid counterpoint to the girl-next-door charm of Mary Richards,. Mary was of course played (by series star Mary Tyler Moore) as a bubbly Midwesterner, a would-be broadcast journalist cursed with the perennial desire to be nice. Her pal Rhoda, a window-dresser by trade, is a blunt New York transplant who bemoans the size of her hips (well, next to the reed-like Mary, anyone would look chubby) as well as her failures on the dating scene. Niceness—as opposed to datelessness—isn’t something Rhoda worries much about..

Part of Rhoda’s unique appeal is that, in a series set in Minneapolis, she’s at least a tiny bit East Coast ethnic. Not that her apparent Jewishness goes much beyond her name  Still, she adds to Mary’s white-bread allure a nice slice of pumpernickel, or maybe even corn rye. So beloved was she on the Mary Tyler Moore Show that the show’s production company, headed by MTM’s husband Grant Tinker, got the bright idea that Rhoda should head her own series. He enlisted the same veteran comedy writers (James L. Brooks and Allan Burns) who’d given the Mary Tyler Moore cast such great things to say. The writers posited that now Rhoda has returned to her native Upper East Side, where she’s living with her parents Nancy Walker and Harold Gould. There’s a fair amount of Jewish shtik (much favored in that era, but slightly distasteful now – are you listening, Mrs. Maisel?), and Rhoda’s Mary Tyler Moore buddies drop in from Minneapolis to help her adjust. I even recall a direct comic steal from the famous opening of Mary Tyler Moore in which our Mary, ready for life in the big city, exuberantly flings her tam into the air. Rhoda tries this in Times Square, only to have the hat flop to the sidewalk. Oh well!

Rhoda lasted five years, so I wouldn’t consider it a disaster. But many of us who set viewership records watching Rhoda get married were bound to be disappointed. A domestically contented Rhoda was not the Rhoda we knew and loved. Ironically, it fell to her sidekick, the sister played by Julie Kavner, to channel all the insecurity that had helped us identify with Rhoda herself. Kavner, who for years has earned a nice paycheck as Marge Simpson, has a great adenoidal voice, and it was easy to accept her as a Rhoda in the making.

One personal story: when I was working for Roger Corman at New World Pictures, director Monte Hellman needed an actor to play the sidekick of Warren Oates in Cockfighter. Since I was helping with casting, he asked me to call in Richard Shull. I looked through the era’s casting bible, couldn’t locate a Richard Shull, but spotted the name Richard Schaal, which certainly sounded similar. I knew who he was: Valerie Harper’s spouse, and a veteran of improv theatre. So I booked him for an interview, and he showed up at our scruffy offices, very excited. Only to be told, alas, that he wasn’t the New York guy Monte had in mind. Rarely have I felt so sorry for a stranger: it was 1973, Dick was wed to one of TV’s brightest stars, and he clearly was desperate to show off his own talents. So it goes in Hollywood—no wonder the marriage didn’t last. And I’ve never stopped feeling a wee bit guilty.