At the age of ten, what could be more aspirational than your own sofa bed and bubble bath, with girlfriends popping in and out, boasting hilarious problems and even funnier bell-bottoms? But when I was a young adult trying to create a television show about the messy business of femininity, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” became a master class, the kind of viewing that made you both want to strive for the show’s level of excellence and give up because they’d nailed the algorithm.īut Mary’s biggest lesson to me was as an actor. Mary didn’t act like anyone I knew exactly (I was surrounded by adults who had an almost irritating obsession with bucking convention), but she was an archetype nonetheless, and she made adult life look both manageable and thrillingly cozy. Sound familiar?Īs a child, I found the show transfixing. She’s also constantly expected to listen to the travails of middle-aged white men enraged about what they don’t have. But she was also alone in a deep sense-at work, as the only female producer at home, having left an unsatisfying love affair for uncertain prospects and in her head, battling anxiety so intense that in one episode she requires intervention for an (admittedly short-lived) addiction to sleeping pills. (“We’re Rhodas” my mother informed me, I assume because of our East Coast Jew status and propensity for creatively placed headwear.) She had a parade of well-matched outfits that would make Kate Middleton jealous. Her landlady, Phyllis Lindstrom, and upstairs neighbor, Rhoda Morgenstern, served as built-in best friends. By the end of the episode, they’ve accepted her into their fold: “You were jailed for doing your job? So I guess you’re just like us.”Īspects of Mary’s story were unlikely: she had moved to Minneapolis to escape a doomed engagement, applied to be a secretary at a news station, and-finding the position filled-was offered a better job. “So I guess we’re gonna be roomies!” she says brightly to a pair of world-weary sex workers. Her Pollyannaish tendencies were often the butt of the joke, as in the episode “Will Mary Richards Go to Jail?,” in which she is incarcerated for a night for refusing to reveal her source on a news story. She had a sense of humor about herself but she was also lovelorn, giving to a fault, and constantly in the eye of someone else’s storm. She was anxious and befuddled, staunchly independent yet often in crisis. Mary Richards, on the other hand, was as close to a mess as the television climate of the early seventies would allow. Her charm was apparent but she lacked the pathos or complexity of her future TV persona. She was witty yet tolerant, solid but accommodating. On “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” Tyler Moore had played Laura Petrie, a comely and bemused housewife who had left her career as a dancer behind for suburban life. My father would occasionally stroll by the TV: “God, I had such a crush on her on ‘Dick Van Dyke.’ ” Nick at Nite, that mainstay of nineteen-nineties family-friendly throwback programming, was re-introducing the youth to Mary Tyler Moore through a week-long “Marython.” My parents, sick of policing me as I watched snippets of “90210” riddled with casual sex and hints of violence, decided that any show produced during their youth was a safe bet and left me alone to sink into Mary Richards’s life in Minneapolis. I first caught a peek of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in 1994, twenty-four years after it first aired and seventeen since it was cancelled.
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