by Bill DavidsonIt was hard to believe. There was Mary Tyler Moore, national symbol of sweet chastity, being kissed passionately on the neck for all to see on the television screen.
The kisser was Joe Campanella, playing the part of a returned former beau trying to rekindle the old flame; and while nibbling on Mary's neck, he was talking about the desirability of spending the evening in Mary's apartment in lieu of going out for pizzas. Flinally Mary succumbed, kissing Campanella back--also passionately. "I know of a pizza place that delivers," she purred. Fade out.
Compared with the sexual outspokenness of the New Wave TV sitcoms such as "Maude", this scene from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in its third year near the top of the ratings, might seem sweet and almost pristine. But think back to "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in its first year near the top of the ratings--as recently as 1970-71. Did Mary Richards of the Minneapolis TV newsroom ever do much more than peck a suitor on the cheek? Did she ever do more than flutter over the possibility of what was then called "a meaningful relationship" with, say, a comic dentist played by Shelley Berman? The answer, of course, is no. And therein lies one of the more interesting phenomena of today's television programming.
On "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", at least, there is a change. Not so long ago the moment any TV series became a hit , its characters were frozen into immutability for fear that even the slightest variation in tone would upset the delicate balance of success. "But not with us," trumpets Treva Silverman, one of the most prolific MTM writers, who sometimes sounds and looks like Rhoda Morgenstern, whom she helped create. Says Miss Silverman, with characteristic picturesque imagery, "We can't Little-Orphan-Annie it up anymore, with the little circles instead of eyes, and the kid never grows up after 50 years."
Such a philosophy does not apply to all shows, of course. Lucille Ball and Jim Arness--even without the little circles for eyes--basically still are doing the same thing they were doing 15 years ago. "Sanford and Son", on the other hand, in only its second season on NBC, has metamorphosed into something quite different from the British show from which its first year's scripts were taken. Probably because of the prodding of its star, Redd Foxx, the series is more realistically black--and even more successful.
In the case of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", the prodding was done by its creators and executive producers, James L. Brooks and Allan Burns. Brooks is young, bearded and beaded; Burns is young, short-haired and conservative of mien. Together, they look like a hippie and an astronaut in truce negotiations. But it was their unique interlocking talents that brought forth some of the best writing on "Room 222", and then their current hit. Both are firm apostles of change, and what they did subtly, within network-circumscribed limits, to "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" makes a fascinating case history of modern-day care and feeding of a long-running top--rated series. "We couldn't even begin to think of change until after the second year," Brooks told me, "but the ideas were nagging at us just the same. A couple of things held us back. First, we won four Emmys in that first season, and somehow you don't argue with four Emmys. Secondly, we were still recovering from our struggle with certain people at CBS to get any semblance of reality into those first shows. Don't forget that this was before "All in the Family" succeeded in breaking down the old barriers. At the time we started in 1970, every other show was restricted to plastic, Protestant, virginal people."
Allan Burns remembered. He held his head. "We wanted Mary to be a divorcee," he said, "But the word came down that Mike Dann, then the head of programming at CBS, had done research to prove that audiences didn't like three things: people from New York, people with mustaches, and people who were divorced. 'Cant' we give her some kind of a past?' we asked. 'After all, she's supposed to be 30 years old and she wasn't a nun.' They said, 'Why does she have to have a past? And come to think of it, why do you have to say she's 30? Just ignore it. We never had to say how old Lucy is'."
"In all fairness," said Brooks, "most of our trouble was with one guy, not the whole network brass. he tried to kill two of our shows in that first year. One was 'Support Your Local Mother,' in which Nancy Walker played Valerie's mother. The guy said, 'This is the most tasteless Jewish-mother routine I've ever seen.' The second show he tried to kill involved Mary going out with a short guy, maybe 5 feet 2 inches tall, and our friend at CBS said, 'You can't have Mary dating a deformed person.' Apparently, he had read only the title of the segment, 'Toulouse-Lautrec is One of My Favorite Artists.' To their credit, the network brass overruled our nemesis. And you want to know something funny? It was those two shows that won the Emmys that year for us and for director Jay Sandrich."
All through their second season (1971-72), Brooks and Burns watched gleefully while Archie Bunker demolished all the old situation-comedy taboos. In addition to the much-publicized overt bigotry, there was frank dialogue about menopause, premarital relations, and the sexual enthusiasms of Archie's daughter and son-in-law. This led to even more frankness in the two subsequent Norman Lear-Bud Yorkin shows, "Sanford and Son" and "Maude". With the ice broken, Brooks and Burns, too, made their move this year. They were abetted by their new producer, Ed Weinberger, formerly of the old bill Cosby show and also an advocate of sitcom realism. They were able to go just so far in the direction of the new frankness because converting Mary Tyler Moore into an unrestrained swinger would be as unbelievable as parachuting Mary Poppins into a bawdy house.
For one thing, Mary Tyler Moore, being Mary Tyler Moore, wouldn't stand for it. She bluntly outlined the limitations for me, saying, "Let's face it. "All in the Family" has opened it up for all of us, and now Mary Richards in the show can tell her mother she was out all night and not explain where and with whom. That's as far as we want to go. We're not "Maude." I feel strongly that sex is a private thing not to be shared with an audience--or even with friends."
Another inhibiting restraint on Brooks-Burns-Weinberger continues to be CBS, which persists in maintaining a fatherly distinction between Mary's show and the network's other more-libertarian Top Tenners. In one MTM segment this year, the final line had Valerie Harper telling a relieved Cloris Leachman that she couldn't possibly consider marrying Cloris's brother "because he's not my type; he's wealthy, brilliant, charming--and gay." This innocent (by contrast) to homosexuality was allowed to run on the air, but it brought an immediate watch-it-Buster warning from CBS brass, to wit: "Be careful that the show does not go outside the bounds of its natural perimeters." So despite Mary's more-intensive kissing of beaus, etc., "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"'s great leap forward into contemporaneity is more limited than its press agentry would lead you to believe. Ed Asner does say "hell" now, and there is an occasional mild women's-lib theme, such as Mary hesitantly demanding the same salary ($50 a week more) than was earned by her male predecessor in the same job. On the whole, though, the Brooks-Burns-Weinberger changes that have propelled their vehicle to as high as No. 4 in the Nielsens have been considerably more subtle and, in fact, more difficult to do.
Said Weinberger, "The easy way would have been to make use of the shock value of a show on vasectomy, say, or Mary dating a black guy, a la "All in the Family". But if we did that, I think we would have fallen on our butt, just as we did when we tried a show on anti-Semitism last year. Besides, people just don't believe Mary in un-Marylike situations. So, when we made our changes this year, instead of relying on a lot of topicality, as the others have done, we opted for a much more tricky altering of many of our main characters. Thank God, it's worked."
The most dramatic change involved Valerie Harper, playing Mary's upstairs neighbor and friend, Rhoda. "Valerie came to work this year," said Weinberger, "weighing 20 pounds less and looking absolutely beautiful. One glance at her and we decided she no longer could be the man-hungry female, desperate to be dated by anyone, and making self-deprecating jokes about being fat and ugly. Now she's a self-assured young career woman who wins local beauty contests, leads an active social life with men, and gets her biggest laughs out of deprecating some of the jerks who date her."
Mary herself underwent quite an alteration. "Now," said Weinberger, "she's aggressively feminine instead of passively feminine and has healthily accepted the modern-day concept that it's perfectly normal for a woman to be happy though she's 32 years old and unmarried. Instead of just reacting shyly to everyone else, the Mary character now yells at people and fights back. Instead of the every-hair-in-place Mary of two years ago, she sometimes even is made to look lousy--which all women do occasionally. In one segment, everything was going wrong for Mary Richards that week. So she had a red nose from a cold, the make-up man put bags under her eyes, her hair was askew, her dress didn't fit her. That's almost unheard of in television."
Among the secondary characters there have been significant changes, too--mainly for Gavin MacLeod, who plays Murray, the news writer; and for Ted Knight, who is Ted Baxter, the silver-haired, pompous, egomaniacal TV-news anchorman. "For the first two years, Allan Burns told me, "Murray's main function in the show was to take funny one-liner pot shots at the anchorman's stupidity. Now we have evolved Murray into a complete character who has become Mary's confidant in the office and who has his own problems--such as a total loss of self-esteem when a friend of his wins a Pulitzer Prize while he's still writing dull news copy on a bush-league TV station.
"As for Ted Baxter, the anchor man, he's still a pompous ass, but now at least we know why he's a pompous ass. We did shows this year to indicate he's lonely and insecure and that the pomposity really is to cover up his insecurity. Having made him a whole new person, we then had to change the nature of his dumbness. In the first two years, we got laughs just by giving him malapropisms to say. Now we have to go further--like having him pontificate through a whole editorial that makes no sense whatsoever as he delivers it on the air. To demonstrate our flexibility, we even came up with a lady-friend for Ted this year--a wonderfully funny dingbat girl named Georgia Engel, who will continue next year as a regular into our fourth year."
The mention of the fourth year brought an involuntary shudder to Burns' sturdy frame. "Yes, the fourth year," he murmured. "Oh well, we still haven't shown Ed Asner's wife, and she can be brought in as a character. And let's see, what other changes?" He pondered for a moment. "We've got a script in mind about our little Minneapolis TV station getting into trouble with the FCC, and Lou Grant and Mary decide to...Oh, Lord, I don't know. But we'll think of something."
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