Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (35 page)

The series also suffered from a sudden increase in scrutiny of sex on network television, even on the groundbreaking shows that had been enjoying great artistic freedoms. In one episode, Phyllis’s daughter, Bess, now a teenager, goes on an overnight ski trip with friends and Phyllis believes she’s spent the night with a boy. Phyllis frets to her boss, Julie, about her fears that Bess might “become a woman” on the trip, and Julie suggests Phyllis initiate a mother-daughter sex talk. First Phyllis insists she’ll know if her daughter has “matured” just by looking at her. But when Bess arrives home, Phyllis isn’t sure. She eventually takes Julie’s advice and confronts Bess about her concerns, only to learn from Bess that she didn’t do it. The script called for Phyllis to do a double take afterward and say, “unless she lied,” which would leave the matter open to interpretation—a tactic that would have fit right into the glory days of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
But
Phyllis
was no
Mary Tyler Moore.

CBS originally refused to air the episode and backed down only after Brooks and Burns, who now had serious clout at the network, stepped in. They compromised with the network in the end, agreeing to cut the last line; there would be no ambiguity about whether the teenager had sex. The conflict, as it turned out, was a harbinger of a more conservative era in television to come, the “family hour” initiative that would soon burn some of the biggest hits of the ’70s. Times were changing. Antifeminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly now had a regular commentary spot on the
CBS Morning News
. The Equal Rights Amendment no longer seemed like a sure thing. Single women facing relevant, realistic issues were on their way out. And surely no proper lady talked openly about sex.

The episode would hardly be the most difficult trial that
Phyllis
faced, but it would be among the last. Though
Phyllis
ran for two seasons, from 1975 to 1977, it never gained traction with audiences, who were already moving on to lighter TV fare such as
Happy Days
and
Charlie’s Angels
. No one blamed Leachman. Tinker knew the scripts never quite got up to par.

Then, shocking news came for
Rhoda
: The woman whose long-awaited wedding had brought the country to a standstill was heading for divorce.

Rhoda hadn’t quite made it on her own, despite her show’s record-breaking early achievements. After the big wedding, the show was noticeably less funny—and less interesting. Soon it became clear: The audacious Rhoda had married kind of a dud. “When Rhoda got married, it was a disaster,” Banta says. “It just changed everything. It changed her personality. Suddenly the show was hard to write.”

Furthermore, it turned out that many fans hadn’t wanted Rhoda to get married in the first place—her appeal as a character came from her outsider status, her valiant battles in singlehood. “ ‘Sadie Sadie married lady’ was what went wrong with
Rhoda,
” Harper says. “Success is equated with marriage. The base of her character was this victorious loser, and she was perceived to have won—she had this hunky husband.” Rhoda had excelled on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
at sniping from the sidelines, and now here she was representing mainstream married women. Adds
Rhoda
writer Deborah Leschin, “I wanted it so much to be a women’s show about women, and her being married took that spin off of it for me.” Now Rhoda had become thinner and more fashionable than ever, married, and settled. Parent says, “I learned early on that it was a bad idea to pitch the ‘bop-on-the-head’ show, where something happened to a character and they changed. It never worked because characters have to stay the same.”

CBS’s Standards & Practices department, fearing conservative backlash, added to the trouble, allowing so little sex that it was difficult to portray a fun, modern marriage: Groh, as Rhoda’s on-screen
husband, always had to have a pajama top on if the two were in bed together. And any talk of sex had to walk a fine line.

After two seasons of fighting Rhoda’s fate, the producers made the historic decision to break up their central married couple. Harper’s favorite quip became, “This is the first divorce where the charge is lack of comedy.” And the producers faced the unfortunate task of telling Groh, whom everyone on set liked, that he was out of a job. The chemistry between Harper and Groh had never developed the way they’d hoped, the producers explained to Groh. He took the news well, and appeared periodically throughout the third season so the show could portray the split. “I don’t think we ever cast the guy great,” Brooks says. “The right person has to walk through the door, and it just didn’t happen in this case.” The good news: Six years after they pitched a show about a divorced woman on her own to CBS, the MTM producers had one. And one about a Jew in New York, no less.

The divorce idea still made the network nervous, but Silverman and his executives also saw that it had to be done. Viewers, on the other hand, were less easy to please. Even though many had hated that Rhoda was no longer single, at least as many now wrote in to complain about Rhoda getting divorced. CBS’s early edicts against divorce proved at least partially true; women in particular felt panicked by the idea that Rhoda could get divorced. If Rhoda could get divorced, anyone could get divorced.

With Rhoda on the dating market again, however, there was room for creative renewal. The show could add new characters, most notably a swinging-single neighbor played hilariously by Ron Silver. Still, Brooks never felt like the show reached its potential the way
Mary Tyler Moore
did. “I feel like the divorce was a mistake,” Brooks says, even though he also felt the marriage was a mistake. Leschin, too, couldn’t warm to the divorce even though she’d hated the marriage. “That made it even worse,” she says. “It left us no place to go. We had no stories.”

Despite the setbacks on
Rhoda
and
Phyllis,
MTM Enterprises had become a major force in the industry. By 1974, MTM was
grossing more than $20 million and had eight comedies in the works or on air:
Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Rhoda,
and
Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers
on CBS;
The Texas Wheelers
on ABC; and
Doc, Three for the Road,
and
Phyllis
being prepped for the following season. Although movies steered the national conversation like never before—the sequel
Godfather Part II
was released in 1974 and grossed $193 million—television still permeated life across the nation. Americans talked about the Corleones at a cocktail party or two, but they invited Mary and Rhoda into their living rooms every week. Since
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
had premiered, CBS had remained atop the ratings, with NBC and ABC fighting it out for second place every year, thanks in large part to MTM. And women were proliferating on TV as strong main characters, even beyond the sitcom—
Police Woman
and
Wonder Woman
were now hits, and that was at least partly thanks to MTM as well.

Only Norman Lear and Garry Marshall rivaled MTM’s output and clout. “It was a phenomenon,” says composer Pat Williams, who went from scoring
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
to orchestrating most of MTM’s series. “That whole period of time where Mary’s show went into
The Bob Newhart Show
and so forth, the way Grant Tinker ran that place was with such class.”

Now Moore’s dream of a hit show had come true, and Tinker’s of an independent studio had as well. “On Mary’s shows, nothing is sacred and few things are profane,”
Time
gushed. “Sex, inflation, urban miseries and small-time office politics are alive and laughing on prime time.” Tinker put it more simply: “On Friday nights,” he said, “I used to make my rounds to all the different shows, and witnessed a hell of a lot of good television being made.” No laugh tracks allowed, or necessary.

(1975–77)

Actress Lee Grant, a high-cheekboned beauty with a wheat-colored bob and blue eyes, was on the rise after winning a best supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of a flirty wife in
Shampoo
. As she
got ready to hit the stage for a 1975 appearance on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
to promote her new television show,
Fay,
she got some bad news:
Fay
had been canceled.

This moment was, arguably, the beginning of the end for
Mary Tyler Moore
.

NBC had attempted to match CBS’s edgy programming with Grant’s show, a sitcom about a divorcée with two children, created by
Maude
writer Susan Harris. (Typical Fay line about her unhappily married friend: “Marian starts the day with Cocoa Puffs and vodka. By nine she’s forgotten her name.”) But after
Fay
had aired for just three weeks, the network caved to public protests. Grant went through with the Carson interview, calling NBC vice president Marvin Antonowsky
a “mad programmer” and punctuating the pronouncement with her middle finger. (Thereafter, she left her TV acting career for directing.) Harris felt frustrated by the cancellation as well and complained in the press, “
I don’t like having to write down, which is what I have to do now.”

TV’s evolution in the early ’70s had created, it turned out, a backlash. Thought-provoking television like
All in the Family,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
and
Good Times
had begun to give way to fluffier fare like
Happy Days,
Charlie’s Angels,
and
What’s Happening!!
Every bit of progress that
Mary Tyler Moore
and its cohorts had helped the industry make was now facing reversal. Skyrocketing inflation, the oil crisis, and the Cold War were providing enough real-life anxiety for viewers, sending them to their TVs looking for escapism, as many critical analyses opined. Or perhaps, as some said, the bounce back from issues shows to
Happy Days
represented an endless cycle in television: Producers had worn out the realistic, gritty sitcom, and networks looking for something fresh alighted upon whatever looked like its opposite—anything shiny and mindless.

Fay
counted among that movement’s first victims, but soon even
Mary Tyler Moore
would fall prey, to some extent, as well.

“
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
? Oh, how interesting. Is Mary as pretty in real life?” It was Treva’s first dinner aboard the SS
France
. She had been seated at a table with eleven Americans who were traveling in a group, all of whom were nervous about eating food they weren’t familiar with, so all of them ordered steak. Well done. “
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
? So what is Valerie Harper really like?”

No,
Treva thought.
I’m not going to go to Europe to get the same questions and give the same answers about myself.
From now on, she decided, she was going to keep her U.S. life vague. She would tell the next person who asked that she worked “in an office.” Keep it blank. She wouldn’t even tell people she was a writer: There would be an automatic assumption about what they thought writers were like. No, let
them have no preconceptions. She would just be another anonymous American.