Mary Tyler Moore Show a Marathon of Change

All right--let’s get out the ballots for best shows of the new television season. We have a contender.

Like a breath of fresh air, it swept through TV during the last week, embraced it like an old friend and hit home with surprising impact. It’s hard to imagine a better show.

It’s about this independent, unmarried career woman who works in a TV news operation with a group of colorful colleagues. And no, it wasn’t CBS’ “Murphy Brown” in the reruns in which she had a baby shower and gave birth--leading up to Monday’s season premiere.

No--this was off-network, on Nick at Nite cable. This was a stunning seven-night marathon revival of more than 130 episodes that ended early today.

This was “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

Hi, Mare.

You really made it after all--still crazy, and wonderful, after all these years.

I guess this is a love letter to a great series, but there are other things to be said too--especially about the show’s sophisticated influence on the course of American television. Oh, sure, there was a CBS retrospective of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” last year, but that was strictly a one-shot deal with clips. The classic 1970-77 series has also been on view from time to time. But the inspired Nick at Nite marathon was packaged with a wallop--16 to 20 episodes a night from each of the series’ seven years on TV.

And as you watched, you couldn’t argue with the fact that “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” has won more Emmy Awards than any other series in TV history--29.

Among other things, the marathon also showed, at least to this viewer, that while “Murphy Brown” is surely outstanding, the Moore series, to which it is often compared, is better--primarily because the supporting characters are more fleshed out and unique as comedy figures.

You can compare. Even though the “Mary-Thon” is over, Nick at Nite is continuing the series every day--at 11 p.m. on weekends starting tonight and at 9 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Immersing oneself at length in the extraordinary ensemble of such players as Moore, Ed Asner, Ted Knight, Valerie Harper, Gavin MacLeod, Betty White and Cloris Leachman was an experience that almost spoiled one for the new TV season.

It was instructive as well--a couch potato’s guidebook to how “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” helped to modernize and urbanize television as the title character came to symbolize the new, single career woman.

There were surprising and overriding factors of just why this remarkable marathon, clearly intended as merely a pleasurable excursion, registered with so much impact.

Why did it seem to be such a relief to sit through this gallery of episodes?

Was it partly nostalgia?

Was it simply because “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was just a wonderfully done series? Of course.

But there is something else that spelled relief. While a number of breakthrough series of the same era added a new bluntness to TV--from “All in the Family” to “MASH” to “Maude”--even those shows collectively lacked the unsettling sense of pent-up anger and in-your-face cynicism and foul language that marks so much of today’s prime time.

You cannot blame today’s TV creators for the conditions that have led to this hard-edged look at humanity in both comedy and drama, just as you cannot blame audiences for tuning in and identifying with such attitudes. Dismaying national events over the last generation, from Watergate to the Vietnam conflict to the collapse of the economy--threatening many with homelessness--inevitably encouraged these views.

“Murphy Brown” and “Roseanne” are much tougher and much more acerbic than “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” yet they are the two most popular entertainment series on TV. Whoever thinks that feminism won’t sell to the public at large isn’t looking at the ratings.

Mary Richards, the character played by Moore, wasn’t as imposing as the worldly wise Murphy Brown or Roseanne. In one of the great lines of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” she says: “I’m an experienced woman. I’ve been around. . . . Well, all right, I might not’ve been around, but I’ve been . . . nearby.”

In that sense, she wasn’t as much a threat to chauvinists as Murphy or Roseanne, who would polish them off and spit them out for breakfast. But Mary Richards, though she came along in a more restricted time, had her own agenda as the new breed of working woman.

She had backbone. Her advances paved the way for the Murphys and the Roseannes who would come later. And the fact that her advances seem modest by today’s standards reflect the timidity of TV networks--in this case, CBS--at the time. CBS rejected the original concept of having her play a divorced woman. She was simply to be single.

In a nutshell, Mary Richards came along as TV was starting to change, and she helped change it. And, in the end, the impact of Nick at Nite’s marathon of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” came largely from reminding us how much television has changed, for better and for worse.

The year that “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” premiered, network TV was still presenting “Hee Haw,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Green Acres,” “Mayberry R.F.D.” and Lawrence Welk. But changes were clearly on the horizon because the schedule also included “Laugh-In,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Julia,” Flip Wilson and “Room 222.”

Things were stirring. And “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” had something extra going for it: It was great. And it still is. I’m ready for another marathon. Play it again, Mare.