MOORE, MARY TYLER 1937-

Television Actress

The New Woman

In many ways the 1970s was the decade of the television sitcom. While programs such as All in the Family and M*A*S*H revolutionized the form, many viewers and critics believed that The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977) perfected it. As the clean-cut heart of the show, Moore's character, Mary Richards, exemplified a new image for American women: intelligent and professional yet personable, looking for love but not tying her self-image to a prospective husband and family. As TV Guide put it in 1973, "Thirty-three, unmarried and unworried—Mary is the liberated woman's ideal." Rather than preaching, the show used an effective blend of humor and everyday life to depict the lives of a career woman and her friends.

Building a Show

In the 1960s Moore played Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show and had appeared in a few movies; by 1970 she was ready to have her own show. She worked with her husband, Grant Tinker, who was then a television producer, and writers Allan Burns and James L. Brooks. The result was a sitcom with its center of focus being Mary Richards, an assistant news producer for a television station in Minneapolis. The show's creators originally intended to make the single Mary divorced, but CBS was afraid of losing viewers. (Moore herself filed for divorce from Tinker in 1980.) She was supported by an effective ensemble cast. It included Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary's best friend; Ed Asner as Lou Grant, Mary's gruff but supportive boss; Cloris Leachman as Phyllis Lindstrom, Mary's strong-willed landlady; Ted Knight as Ted Baxter, a self-absorbed news anchorman; Gavin MacLeod as the wisecracking Murray Slaughter, a news writer and a frustrated creative writer; Georgia Engel as Georgette Franklin, a good-hearted dumb blonde introduced in the third season; and Betty White as the wacky, sex-starved co-worker Sue Ann Nivens, introduced in the fourth season.

Success

Such a diverse cast of characters allowed the writers to pursue a wide range of topics, from relationships and marriage to career fulfillment to weight loss. In addition to such subjects, to which viewers could easily relate, The Mary Tyler Moore Show succeeded because of its realism. Characters had problems that could not be resolved in the space of thirty minutes; characters had sex lives, about which they worried and were occasionally obsessed; and, as in many other sitcoms after it, characters found a second family in the world of work. Success came easily to the Saturday-night show, which by 1971 had become so popular that, as a writer for The New York Times Magazine noted, "Mary is so In …it has become fashionable to drift into the den at a party or even to go home at 9 on Saturday because you simply must not miss this program." By the decision of its creators the program ended in 1977 while still at the top of its form.

Later Efforts

In the late 1970s Moore attempted two comedy-variety programs, Mary and The Mary Tyler Moore Hour. Neither won over audiences or network executives, but the success of The Mary Tyler Moore Show enabled MTM Productions, Moore's production company with Tinker, to gain a foothold as one of the most prosperous of such companies in television thanks to programs such as Rhoda, Lou Grant (both spin-offs of The Mary Tyler Moore Show), and The Bob New hart Show. (Tinker left MTM in 1981, when he became president of NBC.) Moore won an Emmy for her performance in the television movie First, You Cry (1978), about television journalist Betty Rollin's bout with breast cancer and surgery. During the 1980s and 1990s Moore appeared in several other made-for-television movies as well as theatrical films. In 1994 she was inducted into the Comedy Hall of Fame.

Sources:

Robert S. Alley and Irby B. Brown, Love Is All Around: The Making of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" (New York: Delta, 1989);

Jason Bonderoff, Mary Tyler Moore (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986);

Andrew). Edelstein and Kevin McDonough, The Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs (New York: Dutton, 1990).

Mary Tyler Moore 1936–, American actress, b. Brooklyn, N.Y. Although she began her career as a dancer, Moore's success came on with television, first as the secretary on "Richard Diamond, Private Detective" (1959), then as the costar of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (1961–66), and finally with "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" (1970–77), the first to center on an unmarried and happy career woman. In 1970, with her then husband Grant Tinker, she formed MTM productions, which produced other successful television comedies. She appeared on Broadway in Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1980) and in the film Ordinary People (1980).

Bibliography: See her autobiography, After All (1995).