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2024-Oct-25

Just who is Mary Tyler Moore? Who’s show is it? The titular character is Mary Richards. I suppose that means the lead actress is the ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ in question. An obvious answer I suppose, but one that confounded my simple brain when I was a child watching Nick at Night. Why not just use your own name instead of Richards? Perhaps Mary Tyler Moore had so much cache at the time that it was imperative to attach her name to what could be a good but not great workplace comedy.

I already had quite an impression of Mary Tyler Moore by the time I had even heard of this show’s existence. The Dick Van Dyke Show was another show I watched in heavy rotation on Nick at Night, where Mary Tyler Mooer made her first appearance to me. The curiosity of the show being called The Dick Van Dyke Show, starring Dick Van Dyke yet playing a character named Robert Petrie, who himself is a behind the scenes writer to a television comedy show called The Something Somethingson Show added meta layers that my young brain just could not appreciate. Anyways, name and titles aside, I had a juvenile crush on Mary’s character on Dick Van Dyke. When promos began for this show on Nick at Night, they had me somewhat hopeful for a whole new show starring her, or at least at the chance of seeing more of the actress.

These jumbles in actors playing themselves or versions of themselves had me believing that the Mary Richards entering Minneapolis at the start of The Mary Tyler Moore Show was in fact the wife and mother from The Dick Van Dyke; leaving her home and striking it out on her own as a newsroom producer, leaving behind an abandoned husband and son. In my defense, Mary’s character in both shows had the same mannerisms and I think the writers on both shows played to her strengths. She certainly cried the same way on both shows.

For these unfounded reasons, I didn’t go out of my way to catch The Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick at Night as an imaginatively misled youth wandering the cable channels of the early 1990s. The Dick Van Dyke Show itself was an exception to what I usually wanted in my classic sitcoms. Stuff with witches, genies, martians, or talking horses.

What I found in The Dick Van Dyke Show was sitcom warmth. The implicit assumption that Mary Richards is stepping out from her responsibilities as the matriarch of the Petrie household pervaded every scene I watched of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I knew in my six year old brain she was an actress playing two distinct roles, yet it did not sit well in my gut. Also, I did not care for the film texture of 1970s television. Or the fashion choices. The whole idea of the show sounded good on paper but did not land on me. Until now!

I have heard that The Mary Tyler Moore is distinguished as perhaps the greatest, if not, the defining sitcom for the genre. I could agree to those ideas, but I’m not one for making rankings. I liked the show despite the heartfelt center this is Mary and her effect on the cynical coworkers and neighbors (or wacky guest stars!) she has. In fact, I would say Mary’s keen wholesomeness is what propels the show into memorable greatness. Take her away and you have a modern-for-its time level of snark between characters, yet there is just no whole way to tie the cast together to make it more memorable than the sum of their spoken zingers.

With some mild generalization, I have found that the sitcoms that I enjoy the most keep a minimal level of snark. Without that, you start treading into schmaltz. Too much snark, and the sitcom medium turns into a bizarre tragedy. Snark was hard to come by until a few decades into the televised three-camera American sitcom. Starting in the sixties I have found numerous consistently mean but funny characters, or even troupes of characters that have little but snark to say on camera. I’m not sure what an American sitcom shot on three cameras looks like now in the mid 2020s, but I imagine it overdosing with snark, rather than regressing to 1950’s schmaltz.

I find Two and Half Men to be a notable example of what snark getting out of hand looks like, with more emphasis on any seasons past the third. That show will get its due on the Fredlambuth.com blog( which is mostly sitcoms). Anyway, even in all the tawdriness and quick mean wit, there is some heart or a hint of schmaltz in Two and a Half Men’s writing. By the fourth season it becomes a free fire range of each character exposing the others’ deepest flaws for laughs. The laugh track, bright lighting, and sunny Malibu setting propels the vileness of the jokes into disturbing juxtaposition. As if each episode were full 22-minute satires of sitcoms shot by Oliver Stone used for Natural Born Killers’ first act.

The flat bright settings, canned laughter, and quick pace have never felt like reality to me, even as a six year old confusing Mary Tyler Moore with Mary Richards. They are an ethereal world of fiction that bears little connection to the sights and sounds of the real world. Mixing in the vileness of the real world into this format produces an uncomfortable comedy or hollow drama. Dealing out well written snark during situations like death, crime, life changing harm is something I could only see being done on a twenty two minute sitcom with the most clever of writers on the staff. Something I can’t exactly fathom myself. (Right now Kevin Can F*Himself is trying to walk this tightrope. I’m only up to episode two.)

The setting for Mary Tyler Moore falls often more into the category of hollow drama. The actors do what they can with what the writers can give them in the third act where a few minutes of uninterrupted dramatic performances can be given. The setting of the show is on a television newsroom in a big American city. Every few episodes offered the bleeding heart protagonist a chance to tangle with the real world, discuss their hardship with this week's guest, and then be on her merry way. I do not fault the show for occasionally having a serious, tender, or any non-comedic moment here and there. Although the flat bright sitcom world she and her coworkers live in, they still need to resemble normal life in their words and deeds to keep interest among an audience.

Much like how I find the show works because of Mary’s forthright wholesomeness, not despite it. I like this show because it is not what I am looking for. This show is not an accurate portrayal of the streets of Baltimore, nor is it an artistic embellishment of the story of the cutthroat types who started an American gold rush city. It’s a situation comedy on a television stage. It is a very fake beautiful world that does not exist but I’m glad to check up on it for a few minutes at a time. There’s a cantankerous news editor, a self deprecating copywriter, and a dumb as an ox anchorman. They all need Mary but they just can’t figure out why. (At least until they each have a later season episode exploring this infatuation.) They also speak in the most clever lines! As if they had a team of writers speaking through them.

Next time I’ll talk more about just what happened when this show went into the later (after four) seasons. I have only vacantly watched the show change, and recently gone back to the first season. I immediately find myself gravitating to the early stuff.