Sue Ann Carried Off by King Kong...
Ted Baxter as Cronkite's Assistant...
by Ellen TorgersonAfter this week, Saturday night just isn't going to be the same. Mary and Murray and Lou and Ted and Sue Ann and Georgette have all riden off into the dead-series' sunset and only God knows what will become of them. Oh sure, the old gang will be around in endless reruns--probably for another 100 gleeful years or so. But the loveable Mary Tyler Moore Show is over, folks. The very last episode of all time, filmed in January amid nostalgic snufflings, marks the end of jolly times in the WJM-TV newsroom. Stiff upper lips were handed out by the CBS makeup department, but everybody, fore and after of the camera, blubbered anyway.
Yes, in Mary Tyler Moore Country, there are tears, stirrings of instant reminiscence and a certain...well...whoooooosssssshhhhhh of relief. After all, everybody's plain tired of doing it. They're ready for new Elysian fields to conquer.
Still, since they do have to end it, how would they, each and every one of them finish it off, if they could do anything they wanted to?
Saucy thoughts spring to mind, quickly quelled: Mary Richards' having a farewell affair, one for the road, so to speak... maybe with Mary Hartman's husband. No. Out of the question, not our Mary Richards. Although there have been times, it is true, when it looked as if Mary got to know some fellows pretty well.
Mary Tyler Moore, still as pretilly virginal-looking as she was when she wandered off The Dick Van Dyke Show into a series of her own, wouldn't be amused. In fact, she says she chokes right up whenever she thinks of that ineluctable last episode.
"Grant [Tinker, Mary's husband and president of MTM Enterprises production company] was explaining to me that he wanted a long shot of people saying goodbye while I look around at the empty desks. But every time he tried to explain it to me, he choked up. And when I tried to answer him, I did the same thing. It's the biggest emotional wrench I've ever experienced."
But for a goodbye episode, Mary would settle for having the whole gang show in the WJM newsroom in the year 2016. "We'd all walk in like Tim Conway," she says with that wide Mary Tyler Moore trademark grin. Everybody, she says, would hug and kiss and indulge in a festival of do-you-remembers.
Ted Knight who translates into Ted Baxter, and Gavin MacLeod, the amiable Murray, admit to a sentimental seizure or two when contemplating Final Days. "I'm tired of not winning any Teddy awards," says MacLeod, "so in the last episode I'm going to leave my desk and do a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo right outa the newsroom. Someone else can turn off the lights."
"My last broadcast, " says Knight, plangent-voiced like his series' persona, "will be sung and tap-danced. Then I will go off to become Walter Cronkite's assistant." He laughs.
MacLeod has another thought: "We all go out and Mary flicks off the lights." Knight warms to the idea: "Then she gets locked in the newsroom. She's locked in the Twilight Zone forever. She yells for help. All you hear is the pussycat [in the MTM credits] crying, 'Meeeeeooooowwww."
MacLeod: "One of the extras who's always sitting at the desk jumps up and yells, "I'm the Minneapolis Flasher and I've always wanted to get you...'" Knight: "Ollie the elevator man comes in with a machine gun..." Both gentlemen look vastly more cheerful.
Over on the set of the show, the cast is rehearsing. Even in the torturous midst of annealing a show into a witty final product,
people giggle, enjoy their fluffs, and gleefully howl at each other's performance. Betty White relaxes for a second.
"It's been like coming to a party," she says. Then she gives consideration to the last episode: "I'd like to see Sue
Ann have Mr. Right come along. Maybe it'll have to be King Kong to get past her nonsense, but it would be nice
for someone to view her romantically."I'd like to see Lou Grant and Mary Richards get together, because they've been playing one long love scene for seven years. Murray should inherit the newsroom as boss...and Ted gets put in a home somewhere."
Betty slides back into the controlled pandemonium of rehearsing, as Ed Asner--who plays tough-guy Lou--takes her place. Happily chewing cinnamon-scented gum (he passes around extra sticks upon demand), Asner says, "I think of the show as being of stature, such quality, that the last episode should be us trooping off to heaven on the Yellow-Brick Road."
Wide publicity has been given to an alleged last episode wherein the newly married Grants turned out the lights
and Mary Grant, nee Richards, murmurs, "Oh, Mr. Grant." Asner has a hankering for that idea. "Personally,"
he says, with that cunning smile, "I relish the suggestion of me and Mary getting married."Well, that's about everybody in front of the cameras. How about the feelings, thoughts, hopes, and plans of the inventors of The Mary Tyler Moore Show?
Ed. Weinberger, a producer for the series, says the only fantasy he has about the last show is pulling it off. "None of us has fantasy shows; we can do any show we want," he says. "Although we haven't settled on a real one, I'd love to have Mary marry Cary Grant--he's the only man around worthy of Mary Richards."
Jim Brooks and Allan Burns, the series' tandem writers and executive producers, and the show's creators, have the same mixed feelings about hte Great Last Episode as do the others. Brooks says he's "hysterical" about it: "We'll allow ourselves to be sentimental--that could mean an orgy of tears."
The series' main director, Jay Sandrich, is pragmatic about the show's conclusion. He couldn't, he says, in bluntly charming candor, care less. "The character's aren't real to me. How could they be real when we have to do things for either comedic or tragic reasons--not like real people behave at all?" He does care about the real people who play those characters, though, and he'd enjoy a "surprise party for the last episode where all the people who've been involved in Mary's life come back--Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, Eileen Heckart."
Perhaps the final word on the final episode belongs to Grant Tinker, who had the first word seven years ago: "I'd like to get the impression that Mary is leaving WJM and going on to a new life in the last episode, just as she came into the newsroom in the first episode from somewhere else. Then the viewer can imagine what the new life would be--like the end of the Lone Ranger. Mary leaves and Lou says to everyone, "Hey, who was the masked girl?"
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