Funny girls: A revolution in comedy
Harper and Moore set the stage for today’s sassy, female- led sitcoms
They were giants then. The Mary Tyler Moore Show changed television comedy in ways that reverberate to this day — more so, perhaps, than any other sitcom. It never cracked the Top 5 during its seven- season run from 1970 to 1977, but as TV historian Steven Stark noted, Mary Tyler Moore was important for reasons beyond ratings and rerun success.
It popularized the workplace comedy, focusing on a segment of society that had been largely overlooked or ignored by TV — the single, working woman living in the big city.
As a comedy, it often sacrificed laughs for what Stark would call “little epiphanies” — it could be moving and insightful, if not consistently funny. It spawned a spinoff, Rhoda, with Valerie Harper reprising her role as Mary Richards’ fashion- obsessed friend and upstairs neighbour, Rhoda Morgenstern. It ran for five seasons ( 1974 to 1978) and won a devoted following.
That’s just one reason why Harper’s admission that she’s facing a rare and incurable form of brain cancer has shaken so many people on such a fundamental level.
Rhoda and the female- friendly sitcoms that followed — Friends, Cybill, Roseanne, Grace Under Fire, Golden Girls, Ellen, The Nanny and innumerable others — followed a blueprint created by I Love Lucy in 1951 and perfected by Mary Tyler Moore 20 years later.
I Love Lucy seems like an anachronism today, but it stood out at the time because its star was a woman. Rarely in the history of popular entertainment had a woman attained a following beyond that of a man’s, Stark noted in his seminal book, Glued to the Set: The 60 Television Shows and Events That Made Us Who We Are Today. In the movies, there was only Marilyn Monroe; in popular music, only Madonna and, perhaps Lady Gaga today.
Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda built on I Love Lucy, but emphasized character and relationships over goofy, implausible situations — keeping the comedy but removing the situation.
Rhoda would mirror the societal changes happening at the time in other ways, too. After two seasons of stories about married life, Rhoda’s producers decided a happily married couple was not as potentially funny as two struggling singletons. And so Rhoda and her newlywed Joe Gerard, played by David Grob, separated soon after the start of the 1976- 77 season.
Rhoda made new friends, adjusted to a new life of separation, joined her sister at mixers and singles bars, and had to deal once again with being perceived as the lonely single. Gerard was gradually phased out, as a prelude to divorce. Equally inevitably, Rhoda itself would survive just one more season before it, too, was retired midway through season five.
In its heyday, Rhoda, like Mary Tyler Moore, reflected the demographic changes happening at the time. Millions of single baby- boom women — much like Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern — were heading out into the world. “Woodstock Nation,” cultural historians David Marc and Robert J. Thompson wrote, “had become Planet of the Singles.”
It’s hard to believe today but in the early 1970s primetime television had hardly any programming that reflected the lives of singles. By the time they ended, Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda were appealing to a new kind of viewer: The educated, upwardly mobile, high- income earner.
They also ushered in the age of the TV breakup. Harper won an Emmy for best supporting actress in a comedy, for a 1973 episode of Mary Tyler Moore in which Mary fixes Rhoda up with an old boyfriend, only to have him show up with his wife. Two years later, Harper won an Emmy for best actress, for Rhoda this time, over a field that included, ironically enough, her one- time colleague and mentor Moore.
Mary Tyler Moore also ushered in TV comedy that doesn’t rely solely on story to drive each episode’s action. In one episode, Mary and Rhoda signed on with a club for divorcees, for example, just so they could get a cheap group rate for a trip to Paris — a variation on a theme that would be reinvented and repeated years later on sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends.
Sitcoms like Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda, and the actors like Harper, Moore and Betty White who brought those characters to life, will leave a lasting legacy.