In the real one, they don't have to be funny once a week
by Rowland BarberPerhaps the worst place to watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which is set largely in the news room of WJM, a fictional independent Minneapolis television station, is in the news room of WTCN, Ch. 11, which is the only actual independent commercial station in Minneapolis. There are three monitor sets in the WTCN news room, one of which is always tuned to CBS (Ch. 4) at 8 o'clock on Saturday night. Another set keeps a silent eye on WTCN's own programming (Hee Haw), while the third monitor, also soundless, is tuned to an NBC movie on Ch. 5.
Mary Tyler Moore has a captive audience of two in the news room, not including myself: Jill Olmstead, a college student-intern and part-time news writer; and Roger Buxton, sportscaster. They are both racing the clock to finish writing copy for the 9:30 News. Jill's Mary-watching is fragmentary at bbest as she concentrates on pecking out a story about the Minneapolis Jaycees' pilot program for admitting women members. Roger pays the CBS show no heed whatsoever. He pounds out his version of the afternoon's Minnesota-Michigan State football game while tuned in to the radio play-by-play of a North Stars Hockey game. You can barely hear the MTM dialogue over the noise of the radio and the typewriters. Jill sneaks a look at the monitor as the episode's premise is laid out: Mary Richards' Aunt Flo, a world-famous columnist, is coming to visit her in Minneapolis. (Ted Baxter: "Hey, maybe while she's here, she'll interview me.") Jill leans an elbow on her typewriter, smiling at the line, playing a moment's hooky from her work.
She is abruptly unhooked from the show as Nancy Nelson, WTCN's weekend weathercaster, enters the news room and opens the door to the Teletype cubicle. The demonic chatter of the three machines--news, sports, weather--engulfs all other sound in the room. Jill turns back to the liberated Jaycees. But now the weekend producer is standing in front of her with a problem. Producer: "Jill, we can't do it this way--go from a chromakey into a two-shot." Jill: "All right. I'll change the sequence." Producer: "Another thing. Which stopwatch did you use to time this out on? The one next to projection?" Jill: "No, the one over by the tape machine." Producer: "OK. Makes a difference, you know." He leaves. Jill stares blankly at Mary Tyler Moore, trying to get her train of thought back on the track.
The show gets through to her again. She laughs out loud, when a line by Murray hits home: "I just wish I were working on a little more exciting copy than this: "Window Makers Irked by Putty Prices'." Roger manages, dexterously, to light a cigar without breaking stride on his typewriter. He is not in the least curious as to what Jill has found so funny. Two technicians stray in for a minute or so, with no reaction, then wander out again.
Now, at 8:22, the anchorman enters. If it had been Ted Baxter, of course, he would hve struck his haberdashery-model pose, shot his cuffs, flashed his pearly dentures and trumpeted his familiar, "Hi, guys!" But the anchorman at WTCN is Gil Armundson, who is also the station's news director, and who is also the station's news director, and who is about as unlike Ted Baxter--or Lou Grant--as any man could be. He's wearing a sports jacket, shirt collar open, his air-time necktie hanging out of his pocket. He nods a greeting to Roger and to Jill, respectful of their need for concentration, then perces on a corner of an empty desk to chat, sotto voce. Even in normal conversation, and on the air, Armundson's voice is sof. Everything about him is low-key. He is short, sturdily built, bushy-browed, seemingly void of tension. Your Small-Town Mid-America Mr. Friendly. Who happens to be a crackerjack television newsman. And who happens to be a fan of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
"That Ed Asner is really something else, isn't he?" says Gil. "I'm supposed to be the Lou Grant around here, but---" He laughs. "Not much resemblance, is there? Nobody--not even the custodian--calls me 'Mr. Armundson.' I don't keep a bottle in my desk. I don't have affairs with cocktail lounge singers. The big things in my life are my wife and my two boys, and duck hunting, and my work--which I happen to love. And that's the end of my colorful biography." I ask Gil if there are any clear parallels between his operation and the fictional news room on CBS. "Not many," he says. "Mainly because we don't have to be funny once a week. This room, as you can see, is bigger and newer and quieter looking than the one on the show. From what I can gather, they must do a supper-time news program on Mary Tyler Moore. Everybody's there up to show time, then they go on the air, then they all go home. The only time I know of that we'll all be here at the same time--ever--will be on Tuesday when we have our picture taken for TV GUIDE. Otherwise, we're all over the place. Out on assignments, shooting, interviewing, editing film, timing tapes, working on titles and credits."
On the monitor set, Mary is over. Jill--the apprentice Mary--has finished her copy and gone to a concert. Roger is in the film-editing room rechecking the football game footage. Bob Newhart comes on Ch. 4. Gil excuses himself to go into his private office to check the copy for the 9:30 News (on Saturday nights he only reads; on weeknights he writes his own stories). The newsroom is now deserted. "Monday morning will be a whole different scene," Gil had said. "Our producer, Peggy, will be here. I guess she would be our Mary Tyler Moore. So will Curt Johnson, who would be our Murray." On Monday morning the only difference in the scene is the greater number of cars in the parking lot.
WCN-TV is housed in a showcase six-million-dollar structure in the suburban/industrial-park area of Golden Valley, west of Minneapolis proper. Its interior ambience is understated opulance: wall-to-wall carpeting in station-logo design, soft lighting, the broad corridors hung with a half-million dollar collection of contemporary art. I find Gil in his office, working on copy for the midday news. The only person in the newsroom proper is Peggy Keane, writer-reporter-producer. At the moment she is going over material for an upcoming public-affairs special on child abuse.
Peggy Keane is a bespectacled young lady with candid blue-green eyes and an infections laugh. At 27, she is a television success story in midchapter. She is determined, a prodigious learner, and flap-proof. She will go as far in the field as she wants to go. When the station hired he (after she'd served a news internship there as part of her master's degree program), she was living on food stamps and had to hitchhike to work. Now she's a staff fixture. I remark that it is very quiet here for a Monday morning. "Everybody's busy," she says. "Curt, the other reporter, is out with Doug, the photographer, covering a computer seminar. Tom is out shooting a bank opening. The sports guys and the weathercaster will be in later--they aren't involved in the midday news."
"What about the credibility of The Mary Tyler Moore Show?", I ask Peggy. "In their news room, you never see a sports person, or a photographer, or a 16-millimeter camera, or even a can of film or a tape cartridge." "True," she says, "it does seem more like a radio news department. But don't forget--we see only half the room on TV. Besides, it's a comedy. When they ignore their deadlines and get rapping about each other's personal problems, that's poetic license, I guess. I just adore the show. Those characters are classic, all of them." I press on. "But truthfully," I say, "judging from your own experience here, would you believe that Mary Richards was a producer?" Peggy laughs. "No," she says bluntly. "This is a luxury for me, to be able to sit at my desk. In the course of a day doing what a producer does, I must walk a hundred miles. I am all over this building. To taping, to film editing, to the art department, to the studio, to Master Control, upstairs to promotion and public affairs. Or I'm out on a story. Gil's been working with me on my voice and delivery, witha tape recorder; I've joined the union, and I can go on the air now. [She has recently been doing a lot more on-the-air work, includign a feature that followed her weight loss of 30 pounds.] Then, I have to be here every day at 3 o'clock, to take the TVN feed [a syndicated national and international news service from New York that has since gone out of business]. Then I get to sit down here and write my copy. But then I have to cut and splice and edit and time everything out, do the credits and titles and put all the pieces of the show together."
The phone rings. Peggy picks it up. "News Room...Hi, Tom...No, Doug's with Curt at the computer show, then they've got to cover the U. of M. football lunch...Tat's what it says on the assignment sheet--you're supposed to shoot the bank opening...I agree with you 100 per cent, Tom, but that's what it says..."
Gil, who had drifted out of his office to join us, grins and says, "Some days our local news is not exactly zingy. But you know, we're now beating out the NBC and CBS stations in the numbers. They have staffs of 50 people--and there are essentially just 3 1/2 of us, 9 1/2 counting photographers and sports guys. Of course, we don't bump heads. We go on at 9:30 p.m., while they have to fill the supper-time hour. What really gets me is this," he goes on. "Consistently our reruns beat out the network news on 4 and 5. The Partridge Family [the station is now showing The Andy Griffith Show] clobbers Walter Cronkite." He shakes his head. "It's nothing to be smug about. There's really something wrong about that."
I drive with Peggy out to her house during her lunch break. She lives 10 minutes from the station, in a cement-block cube she shares with her brother Tom, who goes to a technical trade school. Inside, the house is a comfortable, neo-collegiate rumple-- a hmey contrast to the gadgety svelte of Mary Richards' apartment. "Boy, she must make a lot more money than I do!" Peggy says when I note this. "But I'm not complaining. When I think how it was a year ago. Hitching a ride to the station on a truck in a blizzard. I can't forget. Last month we did a special on welfare. Somebody said we'll need to how a close-up of a food stamp--but where could we get one? Well, I happened to have one in my purse. Kept it as a souvenir. I wonder if Mary Richards could have settled the problem that easily."
On the way back to the station, she tells me more about herself. Peggy is the oldest of six children (her father works in the ad department of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune), and she's had to make her own way ever since she can remember. "When my WTCN internship ran out, Gil said, 'What are you going to do now?' and I said, 'I was really hoping you'd give me a job,' I refused to give up and go anywhere else, and then Gil hired me.
"I'm so lucky. I'm the only one in my St. Cloud State College class who's come this far in the business. The only girl. And you know what? I have Mary Tyler Moore to thank for that. I am so grateful to that show! Otherwise I'd just be a writer, period. WTCN hired the first female cameraperson in town--also because of Mary.
"Sure, some of the men at the station give me a little flak now and then. What do you think this oscilloscope does?' They keep testing me. But either I know what they're talking about or I can bull my way out. And once in a while I take the pains to ask them questions that will, you know, let them show their prowes. 'Come over and check this--I think this meter's a little high,' But I do not cater to them. Never. It's not that I'm a militant or a feminist or anything. Well, maybe I would be if they hired a man in my department for more than I'm making. Right now I am very happy. All my learning has been hands-on, and that's terrific. I feel so sorry for people who don't like their work. I can't imagine what that would be like.
There's a near quorum present in the newsroom when we return after lunch: reporter Curt Johnson, photographer Doug Froemming, sports director Ray Scott (who has since gone to Milwaukee), and Gil Amundson. Curt tells us about the marvelous weekend he's had helping his father-in-law harvest sunflowers up in North Dakota,] which reminds Ray somehow of a story from his days as an announcer for the Pittsburgh Pirates, which reminds Gil of the winter morning the Teletype froze in the radio station where he worked and he had to go on the air reading the news from the morning paper.
For a moment, I have a flash of déjà vu, and would not be surprised to hear from the doorway a mellifluous "Hi, guys!" But our coffee is soon finished, and the bull session breaks up. It is time to go take the TVN feed, to cut the football-lunch footage, to write the computer story, to check the sports ticker, to see if the film on the bank opening looks enough like news to run. The department is back to normal. Life has done enough imitation of art for the day.
Last updated: Wednesday, 11/15/06, , GMT Standard Time
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