Moore, Moore, Moore Mary Tyler Moore Shows

December 29 was the birthday of the late Mary Tyler Moore (1936-2017). When Moore passed away (yipes, seven years ago) I dashed off a tribute that was grief-stricken and glowing but a little vague in detail. So today I thought I would add to her presence here in a post that will fill in some gaps, though I still recommend checking out that first post to complement this one. It also has a gallery of images from my wife’s family’s old TV Guide collection.

Moore had this wholesome, All-American image, with that toothy, pageant-contestant’s grin, and her careful, proper sounding manners. She’d moved to Los Angeles with her family when she was eight. Prior to that she had lived in Brooklyn and Queens, though little of those early years seemed present in her personality. She began her career as a dancer in TV commercials, and occasionally had an opportunity to showcase her song and dance chops as a regular on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66), which we wrote about here.

In 1967 she held her own alongside Julie Andrews in the musical film Thoroughly Modern Millie. This was followed by What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968) with George Peppard, Don’t Just Stand There! (1968) with Robert Wagner, and the appalling Change of Habit (1969) with Elvis Presley. That same year she appeared on the variety special Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, and her success there gave her the juice to get her own starring sit-com The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77).

She and her husband Grant Tinker formed MTM Enterprises (its clever twist on MGM had a housecat instead of a lion in the logo’s center) to produce her first starring vehicle, expertly crafted for her by the team of James L. Brooks and Allan Burns. I wrote a little about the show’s political and social influence in the earlier post. Here I will merely reiterate its status as one of the most perfect TV sit-coms ever devised, on every level, from beginning to end. Like M*A*S*H, it was one of those shows that one looked at weekly in prime time, even as you watched the earlier episodes daily in syndication. I feel like I ended up seeing every episode about five times. The show’s setting, a local TV news division in Minneapolis, was a perfect engine for plots, as was the main character’s situation: a single working girl in the city, trying to figure out what she wanted. Once upon a time, the answer would automatically have been marriage. In the 1970s, this was no longer the case.

The show had one of the best ensemble casts in the history of television comedy: Ed Asner, Ted Knight,Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, Gavin MacLeod,Betty White, and Georgia Engel, with recurring cast including John Amos,Joyce Bulifant, Lisa Gerritsen, Nancy Walker, and Harold Gould. And (one of the hallmarks of a good show) there were several memorable guest stars in unforgettable episodes including Harper’s husband Dick Schaal,Eileen Heckart, Sheree North, Barbara Colby,Nanette Fabray, Ted Bessell,Arlene Golonka, et al. The cast was so good that three of them (Harper, Leachman, and Asner) got their own spin-off series, and four (Knight, McLeod, White, and Amos) went on to other hit series of their own. At the same time, MTM was producing hit sitcoms for Bob Newhart, and many others. It was like a gold mine.

Is she in blackface?

Towards the end of the run of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the star seemed to get frustrated with the same grind year after year (much as the public loved it) and seemed anxious to explore new directions. In 1976 she starred in the jaw-dropping exercise in TV variety excess called Mary’s Incredible Dream. Mary Tyler Moore can’t possibly be bad – but the show is awfully “try hard”. In this case less for Moore would have been…more. In this psychedelic fantasia she’s works very, very hard — too hard — and unfortunately she’s the weakest thing about the show. That’s heresy I know, I’m in love with her too, but you’ll see if you watch it — she was a pretty uptight gal, and there are some moments when she is supposed to be “sexy” in the show that are just mortifying. But the program itself (available on Youtube) is absolutely mind-blowing and I just know that, much like David Lynch’s later movies, or like the original Casino Royale, I am going to need to watch it many times before I can begin to tease out the thread of whatever it’s supposed to be. And I’m just the kind of masochistic maniac to do it! It’s plainly a dream Mary is having, and there’s a battle between Angels and Devils. But as to the moment-to-moment logic of it, I haven’t a clue. It looks pretty damn pretty though! Along the way, Mary is aided (for some reason) by Ben Vereen, Manhattan Transfer, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, and Cajun fiddle player Doug Kershaw. Also, it’s hard to tell since the video quality is so poor, but I think one of the earlier numbers may be staged in blackface-? Needless to say, I don’t endorse that, but it’s definitely a historical curiosity to see an example of minstrelsy on television as late as that. 

At any rate, after The Mary Tyler Moore show ended she came back the following year with Mary (1978) If it doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because it only lasted a couple of months. But you ought to remember it anyway because its regular cast members included early career David Letterman, Michael Keaton, Swoozie Kurtz, and Dick Shawn!

Nothing daunted, Mary came back in 1979 with yet another try, this one perhaps the cleverest of the bunch. It was a sit-com/variety show hybrid called The Mary Tyler Moore Hour. Over a decade before The Larry Sanders Show, this program featured a show-within-a-show. The sit-com component being about the behind-the-camera struggle to produce the fictional show, both of which starred Moore. Some of the cast of Mary returned, now with Dody Goodman, Ron Rifkin, Joyce Van Patten, and Doris Roberts. Despite a promising concept and all that star power, it lasted only a single season.

Mary kept swinging though! She was also trying to branch out as a dramatic actress at the same time. She starred in the high profile tv movie about breast cancer First You Cry (1978) and was nominated for an Oscar in Robert Redford’sOrdinary People (1980). She appeared opposite Dudley Moore in Tony Bill’sSix Weeks (1982) and with Robert Preston in Finnegan Begin Again (1985).

Is it, though?

Then she tried yet another series called Mary (1985), which was also yet another series in which she was a gal reporter. This one featured John Astin, James Farentino, and a young Katey Sagal. It only lasted 11 episodes.

Then came Annie McGuire (1988), a series about a mature couple in a second marriage, featuring Denis Arndt, Eileen Heckart,John Randolph, and a young Adrian Brody. 11 episodes of this one were shot, but only seven aired.

Bloodied but not beaten! In 1995 Moore was a cast member (though no longer the star) of a show called New York News that featured Gregory Harrison, Melina Kanakaredes, and Madeline Kahn. Cancelled after 13 episodes.

There were a couple of interesting TV movies after this. She reunited with Harper in the 2000 movie Mary and Rhoda. And she played Sante Kimes in Like Mother, Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes (2001). Her last screen credit was a 2013 episode of Hot in Cleveland.

or more on the history of variety entertainment, including tv variety, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. And stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.