HER SMILE BLAZED A TRAIL
Mary Tyler Moore remembered
It’s been years since I have watched an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show — the 1970s, to be precise, when I was entering high school — but I always remember the episode where her boss, newsroom tough guy Lou Grant, offers a pay raise to one of her colleagues but not to her. Mary Richards, as her character is called in the sitcom, tentatively asks why, and is told that the male coworker has a family to support and she does not. Tough luck, baby.
MTM looks shocked, hesitates, then marches into the boss’s office and demands her due. Which, to the delight of young female audiences everywhere, she gets. Score one for female equality.
And that, of course, was what Mary Tyler Moore was all about: those early, tentative steps toward equality for women. Though the show’s corny opening number set her up as an innocent young thing travelling to the big city for the first time, featuring the patented hat-toss and cringe-worthy lyrics about how she could “turn the world on with her smile” (OK, it was electric), her TV journalist character proved groundbreaking in how it portrayed women. They could be full-time professionals and single, pursuing more than marriage. They could have Jewish friends. They could have complicated love lives. They could assert themselves — sweetly, mind you, but still! — in a world where guys ran things. The MTM show was breakthrough TV in redefining female characters and roles.
How revolutionary was it? As a little girl, I sometimes watched the Dick Van Dyke Show, a big black-and-white favourite with my parents’ generation, and on it, Mary Tyler Moore played the wife of Rob Petrie, a comedy sketch writer. A scant few years before MTM, there she was, playing demure Laura Petrie, stay-at-home mom (though, in the tradition of the time, a lot smarter than her hapless husband). But by the ’70s, MTM had broken free.
There are lovely teases in some of the Mary Tyler Moore Show characters. The TV anchorman, Ted Baxter, is a bumptious bubblehead consumed only with his own looks and persona. During the course of the show, he is slowly straightened out, by a female character. There is the grating Sue Ann Nivens, the “Happy Homemaker,” who pops up regularly as a reminder of where a woman’s place is really supposed to be.
On the strength of the MTM show’s seven-year run, spinoffs appeared and the careers of other successful actors were boosted: Ed Asner (Lou Grant), Betty White (The Golden Girls), Valerie Harper (Rhoda). Even Gavin MacLeod went on to fame (captaining The Love Boat). And the assertive, risktaking female emerged as a routine TV character. Others soon followed the model, such as the female-centred sitcom One Day at a Time about a single mom raising her daughters.
Multi-dimensional Moore bridged generations of TV and film acting. Her foot in the past was her ability to easily handle tough singing and dancing demands, common job qualifications in those earlier TV and film days. Later, she deftly handled TV comedy and movie drama.
I’m not sure the line between Mary Tyler Moore and our more contemporary female TV and movie heroes is a straight one — I’m thinking of course of the recent passing of Carrie Fisher, beloved as gritty Princess Leia — but there is certainly a link. After MTM, a female character could be smart, funny, strong, make mistakes, push the guys around if need be. And maybe get the same pay raise as the “family” men around her.
To close off that MTM theme song: She made it, after all.