As its early triumphs fade from the air, the MTM empire
makes some changes to keep up with fickle viewer tastesby David Shaw
1975: The Mary Tyler Moore Show is riding the crest of unparalleled popular and critical acclaim--23 Emmys, almost five years of consistently high ratings, two spinoffs starring characters from the show in their own prime-time comedies. Throughout the country, millions of Americans plan their Saturday nights around The MTM Show, just as they plan their Sunday outings around the weather--or going to church.
1978: The MTM Show is seen only in syndicated reruns now; the stars and staff have decided to move on to other things. Bob Newhart, starring in another MTM production, has made the same decision. Tony Randall and Betty White starring in their own MTM shows, have had that decision made for them: their series are cancelled. So is another new MTM show, We've Got Each Other--and one of the original MTM spinoffs, Phyllis. Even Rhoda, the other, once wildly popular MTM spinoff, has slipped in the ratings. Several MTM pilots for new shows aren't picked up. Four of the writers and producers most responsible for the success of the MTM Show leave MTM for Paramount (and ABC).
What's happening here? Have the creative juices dried up at MTM? Is everyone bored? Unhappy? Spread too thin? Is it possible that the original MTM phenomenon was actually just that--a phenomenon, an an anomaly that gave MTM people (and the general public) high expectations that could never be fulfilled? Or have times and tastes just changed? Is MTM unable--or unwilling--to change too?
Jim Brooks, who helped write and produce the original MTM Show (and Rhoda) before going to Paramount last year, views the changes at MTM as "a normal evolutionary process: people want to spread their wings and try new things and they don't always work...companies expand and lose some of the personal touch...'kids' grow up and leave the family.
"One of the things that made MTM unique in the beginning," Brooks says, "is that the creative people--the writers--were put in charge; they even got to hire the business people. But as the company got bigger, Grant [Grant Tinker, president of MTM] had to listen more to the business people. That led, inexorably, to more and more shows, and Grant couldn't sit in on the filming of MTM every day anymore; he couldn't sit around afterward, talking about the show with all of us. He lost contact with some of his creative people."
Because Tinker has always given his writers great freedom (and because he has vigorously defended them against network interference), he continues to attract talented writers to MTM--and he continues to comman intense loyalty even among those who have left. Nevertheless, for the first time, the businessmen may be gaining an ascendancy over the creators at MTM. The result, Brooks says, is a developing tension between the two: "I go over there now [as a consultant] and there are some business people who won't say hello to me."
Such behavior, however petty, may be indicative of subtle organizational changes that could undermine the creative process. But Brooks says it wasn't that tension that made him leave MTM: it was his own ambition: ABC promised that he could create, write and produce three specials and two series--without having to make a single pilot. More importantly, Paramount agreed to produce his motion-picture scripts--an opportunity he had long sought.
The three writers who left MTM with Brooks also wanted to writer for the movies--and virtually every writer still at MTM seems to be working evenings and weekends on screenplays. "After five years writing half-hour comedies, you feel you've written every story, every plot line ever conceived," says Tom Patchett, who helped write and produce the original MTM Show, We've Got Each Other, and the Randall and Newhart shows. Now Patchett is working on the new 60-minute variety show Mary is starring in this fall. "It's the first time I've been excited in two years," he says. "If this show hadn't come up, I would have left MTM, too."
The variety show is one of several experiments in diversification now going on at MTM--experiments Tinker says are long overdue. "We have this 'comedy-company' label," he says, "and a lot of people don't think we can do anything else." Lou Grant is the comedy's first real success in drama, and Tinker has high hopes for another new project-- Going Home Again, a pilot MTM has done for PBS. Tinker envisions it as a 15-part series--the story of a fictional family, played out against real events in the 1960's and 1970's.
MTM has also made five movies for television--four of which have already been shown--and MTM officials clearly hope all these efforts wil help them recapture people happy by providing them with new challenges and new opportunities. "Seven or eight years is an abnormally long time for anyone--especially a writer--to stay in one place, doing the same thing," says Allan Burns, who teamed with Brooks on the original MTM Show and on Lou Grant. Burns has largely withdrawn from MTM himself now, to write movie scripts, though (like Brooks) he remains a consultant on Lou Grant.
Ironically, Lou Grant is partly responsible for his move into the movies. "It's a 60-minute show, and I found that longer form exhililrating," he says. "I'd been trying my hand at movies for some time, and now I want to spend most of my time on them." Burns describes his decision as "a normal personal transition," but there's more to it than that. Working on a weekly TV show became too enervating" and didn't provide enough satisfaction anymore, he says. "I like writing, and I was too bogged down in the logistics of producing, casting, meetings, and rewrites of ideas I'd give someone else and they'd screw up."
Moreover, others at MTM feel, the success of such shows as Laverne & Shirley, Happy Days, and The Love Boat have diminished network interest in MTM-type comedies. Tinker says the successful comedies on television today are "witless...candy for the mind...tight leotards and short skirts." He finds this trend so "disillusioning," he says, "that I sometimes just don't think I belong in television anymore."
Tinker may be so disillusioned simply because he now finds himself waging a war he thought he had won several years ago. "When we first started with the MTM Show," Burns says, "TV was full of sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction. Our shows and Norman Lear's shows and M*A*S*H tried to do something more with comedy-- to explore ideas and himan relationships rather than just trying to make people laugh because Marlo Thomas gets her finger caught in a bowling ball and has to go to a dance with it that night." Now, Burns says, TV has returned to "all those silly, mindless comedies I thought were behind us. It's deplorable."
Tom Patchett agrees: "The most popular comedies on television today don't have any story. They're just jokes. You don't really have to watch them." Says Patchett: "This year will be the wost ever. You're going to see stuff so putrid you won't believe it. It's all going to be carbon copies of the hit shows."
But there's something self-serving about the contention that recent MTM shows have failed because the audience has lost its taste, rather than because MTM has lost its touch. Jim Brooks, for one, won't accept that explanation. Laverne & Shirley is brilliant low comedy," Brooks says. "I defy you to watch a good episode of Laverne & Shirley and not laugh your butt off." Brooks believes that the failure of recent MTM comedies is part of a normal cycle in viewer tastes: "They like one kind of show for awhile, then they like another." Moreover, he says, the success of the original MTM Show was really more unusual than the failure of the more recent MTM shows.
"Success can be a matter of chemistry and fate," he says. With the original MTM Show, everything fell nicely into place: Ed Asner almost wasn't hired to play Mary's newsroom boss; Jay Sandrich was second choice as director. "But it was Shangri-La," Brooks says, "and everything worked out. Excellence is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, and sometimes you achieve it only by accident." Nor, Brooks says, do excellent people always produce excellent shows--especially when the excellent people wind up doing jobs they weren't hired to do: writers write so well they pecome producers. New writers have to be found. No mater how talented they are, the chemistry is different. So, often, is the product.
"You do a show like M*A*S*H or The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Barney Miller and you pour your energy into it," says Danny Arnold, creator, writer, and producer of Barney Miller. "It doesn't necessarily follow that everything else you do will be good or will have that same inspiration. Just because Allan Burns and Jim Brooks did a great job on The MTM Show doesn't mean they can do four other shows, too," Arnold says. "You spread yourself too thin. You start mass-producing. hell, suppose a network read 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' back in the 17th century and then told Shakespeare, 'That's great. We love it. Now let's have another one like it for Friday night, and then we'll turn it into a series--22 a year for five years.' He couldn't do it. No one can.
"But...you can't tell a company with a huge success...'No, that's all you can do. You can't mass-produce. You can't make more money.' So they make more shows and they're just not as good as the original." Arnold knows whereof he speaks. Emboldened by the success of Barney Miller, he created Fish. It lasted exactly 35 episodes.
Next week: MTM learns to compromise.
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