Mary brought social issues to small screen
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was a laboratory for the social issues of the day, which in some cases were being reflected for the first time on prime-time television. Sex, birth control, equal pay, workplace sexism, homosexuality — all took a turn, thanks to the show’s many female writers.
Here’s how they played out:
When Lou Grant (Ed Asner) interviews Mary Richards for an associate producer job in his Minneapolis TV newsroom, he asks inappropriate questions that women in the workplace often were asked: How old are you? Are you married? Divorced? What religion are you? She calls him out but answers anyway, in the show’s first episode.
Yes, Miss Richards has sex
The point was not belabored, but Mary Richards slept with her boyfriends. A real-life Chicago journalist had suggested that Mary, who was 30 when the series began, was “undersexed,” writer Susan Silver said, and so Silver wrote an episode in which Mary asked her friend Rhoda if that was the case.
A few episodes later, Mary goes on a date and comes home the next morning in the same dress. “Men across the country wrote to the show in despair over the betrayal of their trust and admiration,” Jennifer Keishin Armstrong wrote in her 2013 book about the show.
In one episode, Mary says: “I’m hardly innocent. I’ve been around. Well, all right, I might not have been around. But I’ve been nearby.”
Rhoda’s date is gay
The third season featured another taboo-buster handled in a no-big-deal way. Mary’s friend Phyllis (Cloris Leachman) tries to push her brother into Mary’s arms, but the brother (Robert Moore) is more taken with Phyllis’ nemesis, Rhoda (Valerie Harper). Phyllis works herself into a lather until Rhoda puts her out of her misery. “He’s not my type,” she reassures Phyllis, who remains skeptical. “No really,” Rhoda says. “He’s gay.” Robert Moore himself was gay.
Mary is on the pill
Mary’s father, at loose ends after his retirement, is visiting Mary for dinner at her apartment. Mary’s mother, making her exit, turns at the door. “Don’t forget to take your pill!” she calls out. “I won’t,” father and daughter answer in unison.
Equal pay for equal work
The third season opens with Mary kvetching to Rhoda about how she resents the TV station manager “trotting in groups of people and saying, ‘This is our woman executive.”’ Later, she discovers that she makes $50 a week less than the man who had her job before her. She confronts Lou, asking him why. “Because he’s a man,” Lou says.
Before Mary in suits, Laura in slacks
Moore broke ground in “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” too. When the script called for her to vacuum in skirt and heels, she put her foot (in ballet flat) down and her capri pants on. “Women kind of breathed a sigh of relief,” she told TV Guide, “and said: ‘Hey, that’s right. That’s what we wear.”’
“She’ll last forever, as long as there’s television.” —
“The courage she displayed in taking on a role (“Ordinary People”), darker than anything she had ever done, was brave and enormously powerful.” —
“I figured I’d hire a man for it” “There are no words. She was THE BEST!” —