Mary Richards (played by Mary Tyler Moore): “Mr. Grant? Could I say what I wanted to say now? Please?” Lou Grant (played by Ed Asner): “Okay, Mary.”
Mary: “Well I just wanted to let you know that sometimes I get concerned about being a career woman. I get to thinking that my job is too important to me. And I tell myself that the people I work with are just the people I work with. But last night I thought what is family anyway? It's the people who make you feel less alone and really loved. [She sobs]
And that's what you've done for me. Thank you for being MY family.”--The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Season 7, Episode 24, “The Last Show,” air date March 19, 1977, written by Allan Burns, James L. Brooks, Ed Weinberger, Stan Daniels, David Lloyd, and Bob Ellison, directed by Jay Sandrich
Mary Tyler Moore, 75 years old today? Where did the years go?
How many performers are lucky enough to lead one classic TV series, let alone two? How many, in both cases, end the show while it's still on top? How many influence an entire generation of women with a landmark depiction of a single woman in her 30s, happy in her job and her life? As one of those women, screenwriter-director Nora Ephron, wrote in an essay on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows (2004): "You made it possible for millions of Americans to stay home on Saturday night and not feel they were missing anything. For that alone I love you."
From the moment she began playing young suburban wife and mom Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Tyler Moore endeared herself to TV audiences. With then-husband Grant Tinker, she went on to tweak the workplace-comedy format for the series named after her that began its run in 1970.
Though her own series included Mary Richards’ friends Rhoda Morgenstern and Phyllis Lindstrom, the heart of the show was the newsroom WJM-TV. It’s a testament to Moore’s healthy ego--and sense of what made for great television--that she so often played straight lady to her fellow cast members, transforming a bunch of supporting players into more like an ensemble in which she functioned as first among equals.
As the show evolved, it became increasingly clear that Mary’s workplace was, as the above quote indicates, a second family. The ending for the show devised by her, Tinker, and their marvelous creative team at MTM, now that I think of it, has only gained in meaning with time. The funny--but capricious--fate of WJM (the company acquiring the station cleans house, terminating everyone but incompetent anchorman Ted Baxter) now seems like a harbinger for all that has befallen journalism and the American economy as a whole in the years since.
If the workplace is a form of family, as so many of us feel about the arena where we spend so many of our waking hours, then its changes take on enormous importance. When those changes happen for no good reason, they can tear at the fabric of your life. On the other hand, if you’re lucky, you’ll meet someone like Mary Richards, who’ll make you laugh and lift your heart, even in the darkest moments.
I write “someone like Mary” because there really is only one Mary Tyler Moore. Over the last few years, she’s battled health issues (e.g., loss of peripheral vision due to diabetes, removal of a benign tumor from the lining around her brain). When she receives a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Van Dyke next month, then, I’ll be among those cheering the loudest, from one of the millions of living rooms she graced as a funny, warm, infinitely luminous presence in the television age, the one who "turned the world on with her smile."
No comments:
Post a Comment