Love Is All Around

It’s you girl, and you should know it

Lets replace gut laughs with cogent character development as our selection criteria for best-ever sitcom. The Mary Tyler Moore Show of 1970 wins hands down. There's the opening sequence showing Miss Richards coming to Minneapolis in her white '69 Mustang, throwing her knit cap in the air. The theme song, "Love is All Around" is perfect in and of itself. The MTM show did so many things new, and so many things well; it's great to look back.

Prior to MTM, single working women were portrayed as ditzy (think Lucy Carmichael or "That Girl") or they were shown in stereotypical jobs (secretary, nurse, school teacher), or they were prim, joyless sideline characters (e.g., career women with thick glasses and hair in a bun). Television played into every negative silly, stereotype there was. In 1970, TV news itself was also portraying "women's libbers" as bra burning man-haters. MTM presented the possibility that a woman could be smart, pretty, aspire to a non-stereotypical job, keep on the bra, and not hate men. What an amazing prospect! MTM did some other things as well:

o Established working relationships between men and women, not always overwrought w/ sexual dalliance & tension
o Established sitcom dialog that developed character without requiring guffaws and canned laughs at every turn
o Portrayed a single woman who wanted to date, and maybe marry, but wasn't preoccupied with it
o Showed both men and women thru a more complex prism; a woman could sometimes be a rescuer, a man could sometimes be a ditz, but nobody (with the possible exception of Ted Baxter) was locked into a stereotype.
o In a television medium that previously gave us 8 colors (of sitcom personalities) MTM showed 64,000 colors. You had Phyllis, the acerbic landlady, Rhoda the Jewish would-be princess, Lou Grant the recently divorced gruff teddy bear, Murray the wag, Sue Anne Nivens the middle-aged nympho and so many others.

MTM opened the door to a whole new school of television comedy. The situations were never ridiculous, but rather credible and down-to-earth. Many shows (e.g., "Cheers" and "Taxi") have since taken a page from MTM and done well with it. In fact, gimmick and slapstick shows were never as funny or popular after MTM raised the bar. The show was probably its very best in the first couple of seasons. It never "jumped the shark" and was pretty consistently good right up to that last season. Any gripes? Of course! .....

o They spun off two of the best characters (Phyllis and Rhoda) sapping the show of two great players.
o They started centering too many shows around Ted Baxter who wasn't profound or credible enough as a character to warrant that much attention
o They had Mary become more self-confident and strident over the seasons, but I somehow liked the shaky-voiced, girlish Mary Richards of the first two seasons, in her hip hugger pants.

When I watch reruns, I still love Mary's efficiency apartment with the "M" on the wall and the fold-out bed. For a show that wasn't guffaw-focused, they had some pretty good lines:

Rhoda: "They were the nicest couple I ever dated."

Rhoda, about her recent ex: "Would you like somebody spying on you, reading your mail??"
Mary: "No!"
Rhoda: "Well.. neither did he."

In sum, MTM was a great show and a cultural ice breaker. The first episode is now 35 years in the past, and yet it has a contemporary, 5-minutes-ago feel to it. 35 years later, MTM is still a TV Land favorite. And 35 years later, Mary Richards is still America's sweetheart.