Archival Revival (Minneapolis TV Edition)

 

1929-2021

(It's been almost a week since my last post, and if I were to go through Ed Asner's long and impressive list of acting achievements, as well as the equally long, and, from my point of view on the political spectrum, equally impressive list of social causes he was involved in, it would be another week before this blog had any new posts, and I can't let it sit dark for THAT long. So instead I'm going to replay a section of a 2017 tribute to Mary Tyler Moore, which I somewhat ghoulishly used to talk about her famous sitcom in general. As I HOPE you know, Asner played WMJ news producer Lou Grant on that series. When the show ended it seven-year run, he continued playing the same character in an eponymous non-sitcom spinoff. I like both the comedic and dramatic versions of the Lou Grant, but have a slight preference for the early, funny take on the character, and it's that take I went into at length back in '17.)

The gruff boss with a heart of gold. It's obvious to everyone that when he gives Mary a hard time, starting with her job interview, that he's merely having fun with her. In fact, it soon becomes fairly obvious to Mary herself, though she can't quite help but get nervous anyway. In the one episode where Lou actually does have to admonish her (she and her best friend, under the influence of bit too much wine, write some comical obituaries that accidentally go out on the air) he in fact seems less gruff than usual. Despite that, Mary's offended enough by what she regards as rough treatment to quit her job.  When she realizes she's made a mistake, comes back but finds she's already been replaced, Lou plays up the gruffness, but helps ease her way back into her old job anyway. He must have realized he made a mistake, too.

Lou Grant comes across as a basically self-assured individual, but look again. The series kind of danced around the subject, and never said so for certain, but Lou may have been--and I don't use this term lightly--an alcoholic. He keeps a bottle of scotch in his desk drawer, and offers Mary a drink during her job interview. Now, this was back in 1970. It may just be there was more drinking going on in the workplace back then. Except that, on the very same day Lou hires Mary, he later shows up at her apartment drunk! Quite a debut for a sitcom character, wouldn't you say? True, his drinking never reaches such bizarre proportions again, but it keeps reasserting itself throughout the run of the series. When he's (temporarily, as it turns out) promoted upstairs, his swanky office actually comes equipped with a liquor cabinet. But it's all the way across the room, not close enough for Lou, and as his new desk, essentially a glass table, lacks a drawer, he uses the wastepaper basket to store his bottle instead! In another episode Lou gets drunk before going on the air to report the news during a TV strike, but ends up giving a flawless performance, so at least he's a functional alcoholic. In interviews he gave after the series had ended, Asner occasionally bemoaned having played a drunk for laughs. But at least it was a different kind of drunk than Dean Martin, Foster Brooks, or Otis on The Andy Griffith Show. Like that other top-rated 1970s sitcom, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show dealt with serious topics from time to time, but in a less sensationalist manner. Or to put it this way, on Family a serious topic was depicted as a disruption of the ordinary, whereas on TMTMS the serious topic didn't disrupt so much as quietly, almost gently, subvert the ordinary. So it was with Lou's drinking. But why was he like that? His marriage breaks up halfway through the show's run, but alcohol doesn't seem to be the cause of the problem. Rather, wife Edie (Priscilla Morrill), in the parlance of the times, wants to "find herself". And anyway, even back when Lou mistakenly thought his marriage was a happy one, he drinks to excess. In fact, in that episode where he shows up at Mary's place drunk, he writes a love letter to his wife! The arc of Lou's journalistic career, which is gradually revealed throughout the years, might have something to do with it. Lou was once an up-and-coming reporter who worked alongside Walter Cronkite when they were both war correspondents during World War II. But Cronkite ended up at CBS, Lou at WJM. I suspect disappointment that his once-promising career had lost its promise was behind his drinking. Lou eventually goes back to print journalism, but that's another TV show.

(In the above clip, you may have noticed an actor by the name of...

1931-2021

...Gavin MacLeod, who played WJM news writer Murray Slaughter. MacLeod died just this past May and I was going to write a tribute then, except when it came time to type the name of his other series, The Love Boat, a sudden paralysis struck my right hand. I was rushed to the hospital and spent three days in ICU with my fingers hooked to a catheter. After my knuckles received an injection of a massive amounts of interferon, I was released from the hospital with a warning from the resident on duty that I never again type the name The Love Boat [in case you're wondering how I'm able to do it with this post, I asked the retired IBM keypunch operator who lives down the hall if she would type it in for me, which she agreed to do as long as I sampled some of her homemade Fig Newtons.] Fortunately, The Mary Tyler Moore Show poses no such threat to my health and here's what I wrote about Murray four years ago.) 

Mary Richards co-worker, and in some ways her confidant, at least at the office. He was also the personification of quiet desperation, the character who had the hardest time hiding his inferiority complex. Again, looking at it objectively, he didn't really seem to have all that much to complain about. After all, he was married to the attractive, charming Marie (Joyce Bulifant) and had what I would imagine was a fairly interesting job writing the evening news. Even if that particular line of work is overrated, it still beats cleaning rest rooms. But Murray clearly wanted more out of life. He also wanted Mary. This becomes evident as early as the first season when he stares dreamily at her as she relates some bit of business involving Lou or Rhoda or whoever. Murray eventually reveals his feelings to her, and she lets him down in as bighearted, if somewhat self-embarrassed, a way as possible, and they're able to remain friends. Murray may seem like a rather depressing person to be around, but, fortunately, he has a highly mitigating sense of humor, which actually makes him a bit of a trip at times, and, in his asides to Mary, often acts as a wisecracking Greek chorus to the goings-ons in the newsroom.

(Surviving members of The Mary Tyler Moore Show include the aforementioned Joyce Bulifant, Lisa Gerritsen, who played Phyllis Lindstrom's precocious young daughter Bess, John Amos, who played WMJ weatherman Gordy Howard, and, of course, Betty White, so memorable as Happy Homemaker Sue Ann Nivens--Kirk)

In Memoriam: Valerie Harper 1939-2019

Though she's not known for it, Valerie Harper, like Mary Tyler Moore, started out as a dancer and chorus girl, appearing on Broadway with Lucille Ball in the musical Wildcats. She also played one of the hillbilly wives in the 1959 film version of the musical Li'l Abner. But dancing was soon left behind when Harper met future husband (one of two) Dick Schaal, a member of Chicago's Second City. Harper joined the famed improvisational troupe herself, it quickly become her true forte wasn't dancing but (like Moore) comedy. Harper and Schaal eventually relocated to Los Angeles, where, around 1970, she was asked to audition for a new situation comedy starring Dick Van Dyke Show veteran Moore titled The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Moore died two years ago, and in my obit for her I spent a paragraph discussing Harper and her character:

 Rhoda Morgenstern (Valarie Harper) The Mary Tyler Moore Show is often thought of as a "workplace comedy", but in the early years the series was neatly divided between Mary Richard's professional life and her personal life. If Lou Grant was the linchpin of the former, then wisecracking upstairs neighbor and best friend Rhoda served the same function in the latter. Not that the two worlds didn't occasionally merge, as Rhoda eventually becomes a familiar figure to the WJM-TV gang (MARY: Rhoda, you know my boss, Mr. Grant? RHODA: Oh, yeah. Hi, Lou!) Rhoda also figures into the workplace stories in another way. Whatever was going on in the newsroom, Mary was sure to tell Rhoda about. Just as what was ever happening in the many Rhoda-centric episodes, the WJM bunch was to find out through Mary. Nevertheless, it was outside of work that this relationship mattered. Mary and Rhoda forged a female friendship that rivaled that other sitcom pair, Lucy and Ethel. And without having to don disguises so as to sneak into a nightclub act. Pals and confidants as the song goes. Despite many differences between them. Mary was a WASP. Rhoda was Jewish. Mary grew up in the Midwest, Rhoda was from the Bronx in New York City. Mary was the daughter of a doctor, Walter (played by Bill Quinn), and thus probably grew up in the upper-middle class. I'm not sure what Rhoda's father, Martin (played by Harold Gould), did for a living--the internet is coming up short--but Rhoda has a kind of working-class brashness about her. What made this friendship especially intriguing, as well as comically tense at times, is that Rhoda had an inferiority complex that seemed centered on her best friend! Though roughly the same age, Mary was certainly the more mature of the two, and could sometimes come across as more as an older sister than a best friend. Rhoda was more streetwise, or at least came across as more streetwise, and sometimes called her more mature friend "kid" as a way of putting her in her place. But the main point of contention is that Rhoda envied Mary her good looks. Now, to my eyes, and no doubt to yours, too, Rhoda was herself a damn good-looking woman. True, in the early years of the show she had a weight problem. I know this because she would tell everyone, and especially Mary, that she had a weight problem ("I don't know why I'm putting this in my mouth. I should just apply it directly to my hips.") Eventually, she loses the excess pounds and even wins a beauty contest at the department show where she works (in an episode written by Treva Silverman, often credited for, if not creating, then at least fine-tuning, the character of Rhoda.) What vexes me is that in those episodes where's she supposed to be overweight, she merely looks to my eyes to be wearing baggy clothes. Nor is there any evidence that Valarie Harper (who like Moore started out as a dancer) ever had a weight problem. So did Harper just wear baggy clothes to convince us that the character she played was overweight, or maybe, just maybe, the character of Rhoda was never overweight to begin with, but just THOUGHT she was? I suspect the latter, but can't prove it. Anyway, the new, improved Rhoda didn't hang around for long. No, I don't mean she put the weight, or the baggy clothes, back on. She got her own show!  

A spinoff, actually, titled Rhoda. So she got to play the same character but in a far different setting. Rhoda returns to her home town of New York City just for a visit, and meets, through her sister Brenda (Julie Kavner), handsome hunk Joe Gerald (David Groh), a divorcee who owns a wrecking company and has a ten-year-old son Donny. This all happens in the first episode, which achieved a number-one Nielsen rating, the first time that ever happened for a series premiere. And it hasn't happened again in the 40 years since! So Rhoda decides to stay in New York permanently, dating Joe for the first eight weeks of the series, while at the same maintaining a comic relationship with the aforementioned Brenda (who has her own weight-and-self-esteem problems), the drunken doorman Carlton (producer Lorenzo Music), never seen but whose voice could be heard over the apartment intercom, and parents Ida and Martin, both of whom had earlier appeared on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (indeed, in the case of Ida, those appearances had revitalized Nancy Walker's career.) After some haggling--they briefly live together--Joe pops the question, Rhoda accepts, and a wedding the wedding is held in her parents apartment. Among the guests are TMTMS characters Mary Richards, Lou Grant, Murray Slaughter, Georgette Franklin, and, uninvited, Phyllis Lindstrom. The latter is given the task of driving Rhoda to the wedding, but forgets, and so the bride-to-be takes the subway and runs through the streets of Manhattan and the Bronx in her wedding dress. All of what I just described was a major media event in 1974. I mean, a real life major media event. The episode was watched by 52 million Americans, half the TV viewing audience, the highest ever up to that time. Why? Because people (including myself) loved Rhoda, and liked the fact that she finally got a happy ending. Unfortunately, that happy ending proved to be the series undoing.

The problem was, there's nothing particularly funny about a happy ending. Oh, sure, lot of movie comedies end happily, but that happiness is immediately followed by the closing credits. A TV series, if it's successful, is going to be there again and again and again. Which, in the case of a comedy, should mean laughs, and laughs, and more laughs. But on Rhoda, those laughs were in increasingly short supply. The marriage was awkward. On The Mary Tyler Moore Show Rhoda was known for her cutting remarks, but such remarks might wreck the marriage on her own series. So she held back. The series became very unfunny, while sitting at the top of the ratings. Then one day the producers decided the only way to make the show funny again was to have Rhoda and Joe divorce. And when that divorce happened, the show became much funnier. It also plunged in the ratings.

Wait a second! High ratings when the show is unfunny, and low ratings when the show is the opposite. What gives? Well, TV viewers no longer cared about funny. Rhoda wasn't a clown. She was their friend, a friend they never met and would never meet because she was totally fictional. No matter. Their friend deserved a happy ending, no matter how unfunny! Rhoda lasted five seasons, not bad for TV show back then, but by the time it was canceled, the one-time Neilsens champ could only muster a meager 94 in the ratings.

Afterwards, Valerie Harper did the usual ex-TV star things. Broadway knew she could be a draw, and so she played Tallulah Bankhead in one show, and Golda Meir in another. There was another sitcom in the 1980s, Valerie, which she was fired from over a salary dispute (the series carried on as The Hogan Family.) Ten years ago, Harper was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was 70 at the time, and it was assumed her stay on this Earth would soon end. But she made it to 80 anyway. Say what you want about the Grim Reaper, but he was far more generous toward Harper than the Nielsens.