Just an FYI for Mary fans. My local PBS channel is now airing Mary Tyler Moore:Celebration. It will be airing additional times on my local channel and may be on other PBS channels as well.
I am about 20 minutes into it and so far, it's great.
Surfing when it just came on. I just have never understood why every show about MTM says she is the first single independent working career minded woman on tv. What about That Girl? What about Julia? Those shows were on before MTM
shareWhile I fully agree that MTM was more evolutionary than "groundbreaking", I suppose it could be argued that the operative word is "independent". "Julia" (and even Lucy & Viv who preceded Diahann Carroll) were widowed or divorced. Ann Marie of "That Girl" was highly dependent on her boyfriend Donald and her possessive father.
Mary Richards had never been married and didn't arrive in Minneapolis with a boyfriend or family. I suppose this made her the first truly "independent" career woman character. In thinking back, though, how about Eve Arden in "Our Miss Brooks"? My recollections of the show are sketchy, but "Miss" certainly implies being single, and a school teacher is certainly considered a "career" for a woman (or did she still reside with her family?).
For all her feminist activism, I could never figure out how Marlo Thomas could justify the revisionist history about her Ann Marie character as a "groundbreaking" independent female character. Although I'm a fan of Marlo & the show, Ann could barely blow her nose without help from Donald or Lew. She was lovable, but, if anything, Ann was a stereotype of a helpless, dependent woman.
'60s shows simply weren't allowed to be groundbreaking, so THAT GIRL had to rely on the standard '60s sitcom absurdist shtick.
But MARY was, immediately, a period piece.
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LBJ's mistress on JFK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcXeutDmuRA
What made Mary exceptional was that she chose to be a career woman first and
never fell victim to the unwritten rule that every woman had to be married at least once so that "at least you could say you were married," as one character
laments in When Harry Met Sally when envying the luck of another woman who was married and widowed. Mary had plenty of interested men, but she preferred to stay independent rather than accept somebody, or anybody.
Julia was an independent career woman, but she had to be one out of necessity, as a widowed mother of a young child. If the right guy had come along, she probably would have capitulated just for a break. Ann Marie had the doting father and doting boyfriend to constantly fall back on, so she was merely playing at being
independent.
I found the special merely so-so; they should have gone more in-depth on the making of the show. And Gavin MacLeod's weepiness was a distraction.
I'm not crying, you fool, I'm laughing!
Hewwo.
I've yet to see the special, but have heard its tone is very "final".
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LBJ's mistress on JFK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcXeutDmuRA
I loved this special! Sometimes you think that when somebody comes off so lovable on tv that they can't be that way in real life. But it does seem like everybody loved her and she was really a one in a million kind of woman.
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