I hadn't seen Lou Grant since it was cancelled, but I got an old video and enjoyed it immensely.
My question is: Did the show ever mention Lou's time in Minneapolis? Did anybody from the old show ever appear?
Just curious.
I've been watching on Hulu.com. I remember the show from the 70's too. I dont think there was ever an appearence that I remember. I do remember that in the pilot, the managing editor character told Lou to be sure not to mention he was ever in TV. Mrs Pynchon hates TV news. I dont think it came up much after that.
shareI remember - vaguely - Lou making at least one reference his days heading up the news department at WJM. I'm fairly sure of the memory but cannot remember any details whatsoever.
Windmills do not work that way!
I remember a Christmas show where Lou reminisces about Minnesota, as opposed to Christmas in LA, but no specific mention of where he worked or anything.
I think they tried very hard not to refer to MTM. One reason would be that it was a very different type of show from LG and the two approaches wouldn't mix. And the other is probably the same reason that Dick Van Dyke never appeared on MTM, or any of the regulars from that show. The show had to stand or fall on its own merits, not because of where MTM had gotten her start. Same with Lou Grant. They kept references between Rhoda and MTM to a minimum and I think that helped the show do as well as it did, even though it was basically a clone of its parent show.
Mary Richards Aunt Flo who appeared in two epiosdes of MTM season6 played the same character in season 4 of Lou Grant.
sharein the episode titled hostages, grant is trying to calm down the man holding the paper hostage and the hostage talks about how he was just fired for his job and lou says "i was just fired from my job after 9 years." other than that, i dont remember much.
im a journalist major in college and as a side project i had to watch a couple episodes of this show and write a paper comparing it to other newspaper programs and it is becoming one of my favorite shows. i love the character lou grant. he's witty, hilarious and a straight up badass
By now your question has been answered but basically none of the old MTM regulars ever appeared in this series; the only person from MTM to appear was Aunt Flo but she was not a regular. Minneapolis was mentioned but WJM-TV was not. Lou only obliquely mentioned it when he would refer to his previous position as a television news producer. I think the producers wanted to distance themselves from the parent series because Lou Grant was not a comedy and were probably afraid that if there was too much overlap between the two shows, people would not take it seriously.
shareThat makes sense. An episode with Ted Baxter would have been great though.
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