Mary and Dick - Shows of Their Very Own : Divorcing ‘McGuire’ From Mary

Her show didn’t have a title, her husband was recast at the last minute, her pilot script was chucked altogether and her first episode wasn’t ready in time to be shown to the TV critics.

Hey, this chaotic start doesn’t sound like the ever-efficient, everything-in-its-place Mary Tyler Moore that America has always known and loved. And that may just be the point.

Because when Moore’s latest attempt at finding a sitcom vehicle for her middle age, “Annie McGuire,” airs on CBS tonight at 8:30, the producers want to dump once and for all any collective public memory of Moore as Laura Petrie or Mary Richards.

“It’s not the same stock Mary Tyler Moore. She’s different,” says executive producer Elliot Shoenman.

OK, so that’s what the folks at MTM Entertainment said the last time they came up with a sitcom for the 51-year-old Moore. And the 1985 “Mary” was about as well-received by the public as one of Ted Baxter’s jokes: It ran only four months. In the post-mortem, TV critics decided that maybe viewers simply didn’t want to see their beloved Mary Richards all grown up.

They had had plenty of opportunities. After “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” finished its seven-year run in 1977, she launched a variety show in 1978 that lasted only three episodes; a retooled version appeared the following spring but didn’t survive much longer.

This time, Moore is playing a decidedly un-Mary-like character. She isn’t even the middle-of-the-road Midwest WASP anymore. Instead, Annie McGuire is the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Gentile father, a product of New York’s Greenwich Village and a veteran of the Peace Corps.

“Annie is a progressive. She was breast-fed at her mother’s union meetings,” notes Shoenman’s writing partner, executive producer Paul Wolff.

So where’s the humor? Not from a laugh track. Instead, the writers say that some of it comes from the character’s 5-week-old marriage to conservative Irish widower Nick McGuire, a construction engineer. Together, the McGuires have a TV-land “blended family,” with the divorced Annie McGuire and her teen-age son sharing their home with Nick McGuire and his boy and girl in a comfortable home in Bayonne, N.J.

Some comic relief also comes from Eileen Heckart and John Randolph, who respectively play Annie McGuire’s ultra-liberal mother and Nick McGuire’s ultra-conservative father. And the rest of the yucks theoretically spill over from Annie McGuire’s job as yet another assistant--deputy commissioner of community relations in the Manhattan borough president’s office--though there will be no recurring cast of office “characters.”

Until this month, the show didn’t have a firm title. Then the producers decided that Moore’s husband in the pilot, stage actor Edward J. Moore (no relation), simply wasn’t--in the words of one MTM insider--”ethnic-looking enough in contrast to Mary’s all-American look.” So relative TV newcomer Denis Arndt got the part instead.

Instead of reshooting the pilot, the whole script was scrapped because it had been written before the writers’ strike and the producers said they “just wanted to plow ahead.” So rather than the explanatory opening show about how the McGuires met and married, what will be seen tonight is actually what was intended to air as the second episode, in which their marriage is a fait accompli.

An MTM spokeswoman says that because of a last-minute decision to add some scenes, the episode wasn’t finished in time to give TV critics an advance look.

Though the producers are studiously avoiding the opportunity to call Moore’s new sitcom a “dramedy,” they acknowledge that they are trying for a “more emotional” effect--”more out-and-out funny with a touch of compassion,” Shoenman says. “This isn’t a formula show.”

Whether it’s the right formula for Moore is for the public to decide.