The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Both Sides Now

If The Mary Tyler Moore Show, sometimes known as just Mary Tyler Moore, is likely the best or close to the best situation television comedy of all time, it is because all of the characters in its ensemble are faceted and complex people and the big laughs come from seeing how these people react in different situations, i.e. “of course Sue Ann Nivens would think that” or “of course Ted Baxter would miss that point.” We get to know the characters so well on this show that the interactions between them have such a ripple effect that we finally seem to be penetrating some mystery about human behavior.

Moore herself has the ideal television personality, and it has something to do with her high, chirping voice, which she can get pleasingly broad effects with for comic dithering. Her Mary Tyler Moore-ness is like a spigot that she turns on for us week after week, and somehow it’s impossible to get tired of her, even in later seasons where her quizzical looks at her eccentric fellow workers could have started to seem routine.

Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards is often the straight man to the more outlandish antics of buffoonish anchorman Ted Baxter (Ted Knight) and her pretentious landlady Phyllis (Cloris Leachman), and Moore was smart enough to know that her own dry reactions to them could be nearly as laugh-getting as their close-to-nuts posturing, which has a heavy dollop, sometimes, of 1970s neuroticism. A certain amount of insult humor is the only sitcom trope that The Mary Tyler Moore Show can’t entirely avoid, but even that is usually tied to character.

Mary Richards is 30 when we first meet her and making a new life for herself at a newsroom job in Minneapolis after a broken engagement. She has clearly been brought up in the 1950s and still holds some of those conservative values, and a lot of the drama of the show comes in seeing how Mary changes over time and becomes more relaxed with herself and accepting, but this is not a wholly happy process, in the end. The Mary Tyler Moore Show is great because what happens on it as the years pass to its characters feels like what happens in life as time goes by and people very slowly make adjustments for their future.

The writers of The Mary Tyler Moore Show never make a joke just for the sake of making a joke, and they never betray character consistency/continuity for a joke, which lesser sitcoms almost always do as they go on, but a lot of attention is paid to how a character jokes. Mary’s best friend Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper) is a self-deprecating wisecracker from New York, a zany cut-up who thinks funny and is saturated in humor; her ultra-fast verbal delivery can always make something sound funny, for with Rhoda being funny is a way of life as well as a defense mechanism. Mary’s co-worker Murray Slaughter (Gavin MacLeod) is always making jokes like Rhoda, but his timing is far slower and cornier, more heavy-spirited. A Rhoda wisecrack would never sound like a Murray wisecrack, and this differentiation is what makes the show so incisive a comment on character and the behavior it leads to.

Over the course of seven seasons that ran from 1970 to 1977, audiences got to know the characters on The Mary Tyler Moore Show so well that any fissure in their relationships could feel like something that was happening to us or to our own friends. In the harrowing season six episode “Once I Had a Secret Love,” good girl-true blue Mary can’t resist telling Murray that her boss Lou Grant (Edward Asner) has finally succumbed to sleeping with Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White), the host of their “Happy Homemaker” show. When Lou finds out that Mary has spread this story, he gets so upset with her that he says he can’t be friends with her anymore. Mary takes this in, and she looks like she has been told that someone she loves dearly has died.

This is so far from the “very special episode” faux-seriousness of later sitcoms of the 1980s and ‘90s that we could be watching an Ibsen or Chekhov play, but The Mary Tyler Moore Show takes full advantage of the television format in a moment like this. This episode would be moving and involving even taken out of context. When placed in the context of the seven seasons of the series, it goes beyond any other dramatic medium in its intensity because we have observed these characters for so long.

By and large The Mary Tyler Moore Show aimed for consistency and rarely succumbed to the continuity errors of other long-running series, and this allowed it to be novelistic in the way of those lengthy novels of the 19th century where there is a pay-off seeded into the narrative over hundreds of pages. When Lou’s wife Edie (Priscilla Morrill) leaves him in a season four episode sensitively written by Treva Silverman, we have been carefully prepared for this over many seasons, but we still can feel heartbroken for him, and this is a key development in the show’s feminism and humanism. We can like Lou but also understand exactly why Edie has to leave him, and so it’s a tragic situation.

Yet many other episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show mastered a tone, finally, that was neither comedic nor dramatic but lifelike in a very dry and evenhanded way. There are laughs in life, there is drama in life, but so much of life is neither but a blend of both, and the writers on this series had the confidence to catch that blend. In a season six episode called “Murray in Love” where Murray thinks he has fallen for Mary, there is what could be termed a Big Scene where she talks to him about it and lets him down easy, and this scene is so moving because both actors catch the sense that what is really upsetting about this situation for Murray and Mary is that they are both getting older and cannot fully believe in falling in love as something to be treated entirely seriously. That’s the incredible sadness, sometimes, of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, that process by which age robs us of emotional vitality and possibility.