Vital Viewing (Domestic Chores Edition)

 Actress Louise Lasser was born on this day in 1939. She's best known for playing the pigtailed, Mary Quantesque-attired, neurotic-but-childlike working-class housewife title character on...

...this show, producer Norman Lear's black comedy soap opera masterpiece, which ran for two uproarious seasons in the mid-1970s. As if All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Maude, Good Times, and The Jeffersons weren't enough of an assault on Daughters of the American Revolution sensibilities, Lear and his writers satirically took on Red State homogeneity a half a century before the term Red State was even coined and on a consumer culture masquerading as the American Dream. But don't take my word for it. Louise Lasser discusses her unhinged TV alter ego in this recent interview:

 Not surprisingly, given the passage of time, she looks a lot different. But the toothy grin is still there, and when she talks about the show, I find myself...

 

...transported back in time.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman had a lot of famous and/or outrageous set pieces, from the man drowning in chicken soup to the aspiring country singer totally ruining her career by cheefully referring to Jews as Christ-killers on Dinah Shore's talk show to Mary having a nervous breakdown on David Susskind's talk show to the boy preacher electrocuted in a bathtub by a wayward television set to the wife beater who ends up impaled on an artificial Christmas tree and whose feet show up where the head should be at an open casket funeral. Unfortunately, I can't show you any of those set pieces because they're only available on YouTube in full half-hour episodes. What I can do is provide little snippets that should give some idea of MHMH's low-key out-of-key humor.

 

Fernwood, Ohio was entirely fictional, and these places are, or in some cases were, entirely nonfictional, yet I like to think Mary, Fernwood's most prominent citizen, spent much of her time away from home in such venues, and wherever else consumer goods could be purchased. Mary may have been unsure about a lot of things, but the reliability of household products advertised on TV wasn't one of them:

Linoleum--attention must be paid!

The Anti-Mary Hartman.

Friends and family. See that older man on the far right? Why doesn't he take off that overcoat?

Forget I asked.

Not that it excuses the old fart's behavior...

...but there was a sexual revolution going on at the time:

Maybe one of them should put on an overcoat. Maybe both of them should put on an overcoat.

We do know that Tom and Mary had sex at least once:

My earliest memory of the word "cramps" had to do with a warning by my mother not to go into the water less than a half hour after eating. Later on, I found out it could also mean something of a more intimate nature. In the comment section of the YouTube page where I snagged the above video, the following exchange occurred:

 

carley must have noticed the typo.

 

 

Mary sings Gershwin:

I don't know if it was necessarily "over" her...

...but someone was definitely watching.