On May 19, 2008, all of the surviving cast members from The Mary Tyler Moore Show—Mary Tyler Moore, Ed Asner, Gavin MacLeod, Valerie Harper, Betty White, Cloris Leachman, and Georgia Engel—gathered on the Chicago set of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey had watched every episode throughout her teens “like my life depended on it,” she said. Now that Winfrey had become the most powerful person in media—an unthinkable feat for a woman when The Mary Tyler Moore Show had begun—she used her clout to make one of her own dreams come true. She was reuniting the cast of the show that had inspired her to become the woman she was. In 1997, a surprise appearance by Moore on Oprah had rendered Winfrey sobbing and speechless. Now she wanted the whole cast there for a real interview. “The show was a light in my life, and Mary was a trailblazer for my generation,” she said. “She’s the reason I wanted my own production company.”
Her staff re-created the newsroom set of WJM and Mary’s first studio apartment. The seventy-five-member crew assigned to the task pored over DVDs of the show to get every detail correct. They found out how tall Moore was, then scaled their sketches as close as possible to the originals. They scoured thrift stores, antique shops, and eBay for the right furnishings. The wood-burning stove in the corner of Mary’s apartment came from a museum. Lou Grant’s office coffeepot came from the art director’s grandma. With every new score, the staff did a jig to celebrate—’70s phones, a hand-painted spice rack, the exact mirror and pumpkin cookie jar from the original set. The M on the wall was the easy part.
After thousands of man-hours, they had versions of both sets that were up to Winfrey standards. “I wanted to walk through those doors and sit at Mary’s desk,” she said. “And today, I get to do it.”
With the clone of Mary’s apartment as their backdrop, the cast reminisced with Winfrey about their part in making a TV classic. “From this small and neighborhood-like studio [came] these little gems of shows that were well-written and people who respected each other and who did their very best not to get the bucks, but to make a good show,” Moore said of MTM. Winfrey told Moore she’d spent years wondering what might have happened to Mary Richards once she’d left WJM in the finale. Moore had a simple answer: “She continued working, and then she met and fell in love with a wonderful man and they got married and had wonderful children.”
Winfrey broke into tears when Moore presented her with a gold O, just like Mary’s M, signed by the cast. After a tribute to Ted Knight’s memory, the cast and Winfrey shared a group hug like the one that had ended the series.
After the show wrapped, Winfrey walked with MacLeod back to where the cast had their guest dressing rooms, recalling an appearance Winfrey had made on The Love Boat before she was famous. She wanted to write her phone number down for MacLeod. While Winfrey stepped away into her own office for paper and pen, MacLeod slipped into the wrong dressing room, thinking it was his, but finding Leachman there naked. She screamed at him, but after the initial shock, they made up, yet again. It helped to soothe her nerves when MacLeod later cracked, “I’ve known you for fifty years. Why did I wait so long?”
Through the years, Moore tried—but failed—to play down talk of her being a “symbol” to women. She tried to shed her Mary Richards image, her efforts to do so culminating with an autobiography, After All, in 1996. In it, she revealed every imperfection in her life: her struggle with alcoholism, the death of her son, her regrets about spending so much time at work in his formative years, her divorces, her diabetes. She proved that no matter what the world thought, Mary Tyler Moore was not the sweet, perfect, inspiring Mary Richards. She was simply a flawed actress doing the best she could.
She knew, however, that Mary Richards would always follow her. She would have to learn to live with it, and she would have to acknowledge her own influence: Female comedians and producers cited her as the reason they’d known they could succeed in the business; single, working women everywhere hummed her theme song to themselves whenever they were feeling overwhelmed by life’s challenges. (If you think this is an overstatement, you are not a woman who grew up in the ’70s idolizing Mary Richards.) Because of her show, women had infiltrated the television industry until, by the end of the 1970s, professional women’s groups proliferated throughout Hollywood and were filled with high-powered producers, directors, writers, and executives.
Moore put all of this out of her mind the same way she let herself forget that when she was on camera, millions of people were watching her, planning their entire evenings around her show. She liked to joke that the only time she thought about being a symbol was when she tried to get a good table at a restaurant. Then she found herself suddenly hoping the maitre d’ had seen Dick Van Dyke or Mary Tyler Moore or Ordinary People.
She just wanted to be remembered as someone who always looked for the truth. Even, as she once said, if it wasn’t funny.
The television of the 1980s had made it feel as if the previous decade’s progressive television revolution had been nothing more than Mary’s Impossible Dream. A return to vapid female roles and token people of color marked the superficial programming of an empty-calorie decade. Three’s Company, Dallas, The Dukes of Hazzard, Charlie’s Angels, and Dynasty outweighed the gains in that same decade of Kate & Allie or The Cosby Show.
Women’s comedies had a brief moment again in the late ’80s and early ’90s: Murphy Brown upset a vice president with her plans for single motherhood, Ally McBeal single-handedly killed feminism (according to a Time magazine cover story with echoes of the ’70s feminist backlash against Mary Tyler Moore), and no one missed the parallels to Mary Richards. In 1998, another major milestone in Mary Richards’s afterlife came in the form of a bawdy HBO sitcom about, not one, but four single women over thirty: Sex and the City. Though that show’s graphic sex and naughty girl talk went far beyond what we saw of Mary’s dating life, the influence of Mary Tyler Moore was clear. Where once Mary had broken ground by casually mentioning her Pill use and staying out all night with a man, these women went through a man a week. A sly reference to birth control would’ve been the tamest part of any episode.
That’s why it made all too much sense when Moore brought the idea of a Mary-and-Rhoda revival to CBS. And yet the network that had supported her for so long declined. But she wouldn’t give up. She was visibly excited when she talked about this project, despite her previous efforts to disentangle herself from her character. Now she was ready to make the best of her legacy. She wanted to bring the characters back to television, twenty years after The Mary Tyler Moore Show had gone off the air, to follow their adventures as once-again-single women.
ABC, as it turned out, did share her enthusiasm—at least at first—and plans came together in 1997 for a new series set to start the next year featuring Moore and Harper as middle-aged versions of their memorable characters. They would reunite after living separate lives, and both would have college-age daughters. Moore talked it up to the press: It could be an innovative series, she proclaimed. It would take long-known and -loved characters and catch up with them twenty-five years later. It would be The Golden Girls meets Mary Tyler Moore. What could be better?
But the problems soon mounted. The actresses and the network couldn’t agree on a version of a pilot script they all liked, and the development dragged on for two more years. Eventually ABC president Jamie Tarses had to admit in 1999, “This was one of those cases where the stars didn’t line up correctly.”
To make up for the time and resources spent on the idea, the network decided to expand the pilot script into a TV movie, then gauge audience reaction to determine whether to pursue a series. Harper and Moore had a blast filming it, with a sixty-two-year-old Moore even doing her own stunt when she had to sprint down a New York sidewalk, jump over a rolled-up carpet being carried by two workmen, and skid to a stop—all in high heels, chasing a stray dog. She broke her right wrist in the process, perhaps a sign of the project’s fate.
When it eventually aired in 2000, Time pronounced it “ultimately disappointing,” though it called Moore “still one of the most brilliant and sadly underutilized comedic actresses around.” Variety had mixed feelings as well. “Rhoda, you haven’t changed a bit,” a review said. “The sarcasm, the wishy-washiness, the inner-turmoil surrounding a mother-daughter relationship—it’s still boiling over and inviting as ever. Mary, you’re a whole lot harder to write for, and attempting to put a few scars on the smile that turned everyone on is a tricky proposition.” The San Francisco Chronicle had harsher words still: “Mary and Rhoda is to be savored, ever so briefly, for its reunion of Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern. And then it should be spat out like sour milk, in hopes of preserving the happier memory of Mary and Rhoda in their 1970s sitcom heaven.”
How could anything—even if it starred Mary and Rhoda themselves—live up to the memory of The Mary Tyler Moore Show? Perhaps, as that review suggested, the series was better left to hall-of-fame reminiscences. Then again, maybe Mary Tyler Moore itself had helped to advance television so much that a safe, by-the-numbers revival failed to live up to its legacy. Not long after Mary and Rhoda aired, the spirit of The Mary Tyler Moore Show experienced a renaissance of sorts. When those who grew up watching Mary Tyler Moore started making television themselves, a new golden age—in television, and particularly television comedy made by women—dawned.
The fact that tributes to The Mary Tyler Moore Show materialized with ever more frequency in the years to follow was no coincidence. In the mid-1990s, just as ’70s nostalgia was reaching a peak among the Baby Boomers who lived through the decade, a new generation discovered the show when kids’ network Nickelodeon added it to its popular Nick at Nite lineup of classic sitcoms. In 1998, Entertainment Weekly named it the best TV show of all time. In 2002, cable network TV Land sponsored a Mary Richards statue to be built in the spot where she famously tossed her beret on Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis. That same year, CBS ran yet another reunion special, with a lengthy tribute to Knight. In 2006, Moore made a guest appearance on That ’70s Show, which happened to be filmed in the old Mary Tyler Moore studio. The sitcom proudly gave her back her old dressing room for the weeks she was there.
Still more hints of a Mary Tyler Moore resurgence came in 2009, with the massive comeback of Betty White. At the age of eighty-seven, the television veteran made a sudden succession of scene-stealing appearances: first, in the romantic comedy The Proposal, then in a Snickers commercial that premiered during the 2010 Super Bowl, and finally in an online petition drive to get her to host Saturday Night Live. She topped it off with a new show, Hot in Cleveland, and a special tribute from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Her Mary Tyler Moore costars all showed up to salute her, with MacLeod declaring her a “national treasure.” When the two hugged later, she told him, “You’ll have to forgive me for being so overexposed.” He quipped, “Honey, you’ve always been overexposed.”
Cloris Leachman experienced a parallel rebirth in Hollywood, first gaining attention as a 2008 contestant on Dancing with the Stars, then playing a grandma whose dementia garners laughs on Fox’s edgy comedy Raising Hope. She even appeared on the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, joking about how everyone kept confusing her with Betty White.
Ed Asner continued to score a ludicrous amount of work for an actor in his eighties, guest-starring on White’s Hot in Cleveland, ABC’s sitcom The Middle, and USA Network’s Royal Pains. He played financier Warren Buffett in HBO’s film Too Big to Fail; he toured the country doing a one-man show about FDR; and he voiced the lead character in the Oscar-nominated animated film Up in 2009.
What’s amazing is that so many of the best minds in the business still cite The Mary Tyler Moore Show as their inspiration, and their benchmark for greatness. The Onion’s AV Club website declared in 2010 that “All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show are among the handful of TV series that altered the medium so profoundly that it can be divided roughly into periods before and after their arrival . . . . both would change the face of television radically and influence virtually every television comedy up through the present.” True enough, its influence goes beyond simply bringing single women into the sitcom sphere. Its dedication to realism—death and divorce were real and possible in its world, unlike the comedies that came before it—made way for real stakes on television, even in comedy. Whether it was Mr. Hooper dying on Sesame Street, Coach dying on Cheers, or everyone dying on The Sopranos, The Mary Tyler Moore Show did it first. The fact that bad things could happen in its world didn’t turn viewers off; it only made them even more invested in its characters, large and small.
Similarly, the revelation that a show could combine the melancholy with the comedic reverberates throughout more recent shows, including The Office, Louie, even The Simpsons. Power ensembles such as those on Friends and Seinfeld show how wise it was for Moore to surround herself with talent, rather than keeping the spotlight on herself.
At the same time, Mary Richards’s cultural daughters were multiplying on the airwaves like never before in a new wave of single, professional female comedy heroines. In 2006, Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey—its first female head writer—got her own sitcom, 30 Rock, and deliberately structured it like a funhouse-mirror version of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Her character, Liz Lemon, works in television and struggles to balance her work and personal lives, but work always wins. (That part is very Mary Richards. The fact that Liz is also a slob who loves junk food and struggles to find appropriate dates is less so.) Her primary relationship is with the gruff network boss played by Alec Baldwin. She’s surrounded by characters even crazier than she is. And she represents single women of the era perfectly—there is something painfully relatable about a woman who’s great at her job but can’t control her sub sandwich and white wine habits or maintain a romantic connection.
Throughout the first season, Fey taught herself to write sitcoms—rather than the freer form of sketch comedy in which she was well trained—by watching DVDs of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She and her fellow writers talked about the show all the time, particularly the way it focused on the relationships among colleagues who happened to make a TV show for a living. Like Brooks and Burns before her, the married Fey deferred to her single writers on story lines exploring Liz Lemon’s dating life.
The show, in one way, surpassed even The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s first season: It won an Emmy for Best Comedy Series. In the next few years, Fey’s popularity soared, even though her show got only 5.4 million viewers per week in its first season—less than a fifth of what The Mary Tyler Moore Show once got, a testament to the changes in the media and entertainment landscape since then. Nonetheless, Fey’s success spawned a new era in which funny women starred in and created more shows than they ever had before—the next few years’ media coverage felt a lot like the heights of lady-writer-mania that The Mary Tyler Moore Show inspired (minus the hot pants).
Grey’s Anatomy, created by Shonda Rhimes, focused on a core cast of prickly female doctors; Ugly Betty celebrated the life of a gawky girl from Queens working at a fashion magazine. By 2011, the TV schedule boasted so many Mary Richards acolytes that it had reached what one male sitcom producer griped was “peak vagina”: Among the biggest breakouts of the season were Zooey Deschanel in New Girl, a show about a lovable single girl living with three guys, created by writer Liz Meriwether; and 2 Broke Girls, created by comic Whitney Cummings and following the adventures of a modern-day (and much raunchier) Mary and Rhoda. Even TV’s edgier and quirkier heroines showed shades of Mary Richards. Parks and Recreation’s Hillary Clinton–worshipping, small-town government wonk Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) is just your basic single girl trying to make it. Nurse Jackie (played by Edie Falco) has a workplace full of goofballs, an acerbic best friend, and a less-than-perfect love life; she just also happens to have a pill-popping problem and a disintegrating marriage.
Then, in 2012, as 30 Rock prepared its predetermined final season—its seventh, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show—we got a glimpse of the next generation of Mary Richardses. At just twenty-six, Lena Dunham created HBO’s Girls, which follows an aspiring writer in Brooklyn and her cringingly realistic exploits with boys, booze, drugs, and sometimes, even, jobs. The premiere had critics panting about “the next Sex and the City” and stoked deafening media buzz. The first episode pointedly referenced The Mary Tyler Moore Show, as if to point out both its similarities—single girl takes on city!—as well as its stark differences—Mary Richards would likely blanch over the flagrant nudity, raw sex scenes, and coarse language.
These days, those female-centric shows have one thing The Mary Tyler Moore Show never did, nor could have: a woman running the show and starring in it. Thanks to the work of Treva Silverman, Susan Silver, Pat Nardo, Gloria Banta, and others, Fey, Dunham, and their ilk have the chance to write their own words. Fey watches Mary Tyler Moore to stoke her creativity when she writes. Dunham looks to Rhoda as a role model; Seinfeld’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus says the same of Mary. “I love Mary Tyler Moore and, of course, Lucille Ball, too,” Louis-Dreyfus said while playing the neurotic Elaine Benes on the ’90s hit. “But Mary was more accessible. I liked her because she was funny, and she was feminine. She didn’t compromise her femininity to be humorous, which is an easy trap for women to fall into.” Rhimes says Mary Tyler Moore is among her top TV influences of all time. “There was something about the humor,” she says, “but it was also really moving.”
Mary Richards was so real to so many, it’s easy to imagine her still living her life today. But what we imagine her doing says more about us—and what she meant to us—than it does about her. Mary Tyler Moore writer Pat Nardo imagines Mary Richards as an executive, unmarried and childless. Her writing partner, Gloria Banta, agrees. “I think she’d be head of a nonprofit because she was such a good person.” Susan Silver has no doubt: “Plastic surgery. That’s what Mary would be doing right now.” Silver also figures Mary is divorced, and grappling with the same questions she finds herself facing every day. “Are we still visible, women after a certain age? And where are all the men? And how do we age gracefully?” She adds, “The answer to all of that is plastic surgery.” Silver wishes Mary were still around—and on television, where she belongs, continuing to make life better for her cohorts. “There is life between fifty and eighty,” she says. “But it’s not on television. I think Mary would be trying to fix that.”
Or perhaps she’d just be happy to relax into her later years, knowing she’d changed the lives of millions of people in a million different ways. She gave Treva Silverman a female character worth writing for. She launched the careers of dozens of female comedy writers. She brought the words and humor of Jim Brooks and Allan Burns to as many people as possible. She gave Joe Rainone five double-spaced pages of inspiration every week for seven years. And she gave everyone who watched the unexpected laughs and tears they had come to expect. Not bad for a single girl from Roseburg, Minnesota.