Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (14 page)

As the official Friday pilot taping approached, the producers took all the practical steps they could to avoid another meltdown. They made sure the sound was working, the cameras weren’t hindering the audience’s view, and the air-conditioning was running. Brooks and Burns relinquished the audience warm-up: Lorenzo Music took over as promised, and charmed the audience. Sandrich reminded Asner
to concentrate on delivering the “I
hate
spunk” line with “controlled anger,” not all-out rage. The women sat in the makeup room’s three chairs, chatting, practicing lines, getting primped with hair spray and amber eye shadow. The two hundred fresh audience members filed into the studio bleachers, ready for a show.

The only major change to the script was pigtailed twelve-year-old Lisa Gerritsen as Phyllis’s daughter, Bess, saying, “Aunt Rhoda’s really a lot of fun,” as Mary opened the curtains in her new apartment to see a harried Rhoda on her balcony in the opening scene. Gerritsen was the granddaughter of child actor and later screenwriter True Eames Boardman, as well as the great-granddaughter of silent film actors, but she had now made her own showbiz history.

This time, the audience roared. Gerritsen’s new line seemed to indeed be the magic bullet. The entire scene soared. Brooks and Burns avoided looking at each other, afraid to jinx the laughter they now heard. But they made delighted eye contact as the next scene began. The atmosphere lightened like it was filling with helium, taking the studio up higher and higher.

The audience’s response this time gave Moore confidence that buoyed her right through the rest of the taping and spread to her fellow actors. In the next scene, Mary sat down for an interview with Mr. Grant. He asked her about her religion and marital status; the audience laughed this time. He offered her a drink. Asner’s instincts told him to make an aggressive turn toward Moore as a windup to the scene’s conclusion. His anger and mania finally came off the way it was supposed to: over-the-top funny. Dying was hard; comedy was harder. But it was awfully fun when you nailed it.

“You know what?” Asner finally said as Mr. Grant. “You’ve got spunk.” Mary nodded in agreement, then he delivered the punch line: “I
hate
spunk!”

Asner saw the audience take off like a guided missile. He felt empowered, like King Kong. He could squeeze the entire crowd in his massive hands.

The audience laughed when Mr. Grant told Mary he’d fire her if he didn’t like her
or
if she didn’t like him. They laughed when Phyllis had the locks on Mary’s apartment changed to keep “dumb, awful Rhoda” out. Moore pulled off a star-quality performance. She looked adorable while juggling high comedy and the weight of the more poignant moments when her ex pays her one final visit.

With the tiniest tweak to the script, the taping went down in television history as a smash.

As for that ex, and the originally disgruntled actor who played him, the producers had to admit he did a good job. But not quite good enough to make up for his earlier misbehavior. After the successful taping, Duncan asked them, “Could I be a recurring character on the show?”

“We don’t think so,” they replied, “but thanks for your offer.”

Despite the triumphant pilot performance,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
still faced a major hurdle: Test screenings, even of that second filming, were going poorly with sample viewers when they watched a taped version. The questionnaires that viewers completed showed they thought Mary was a loser. Why was she thirty and still single? Was Ed Asner’s character Jewish? Why was Rhoda so mean? The network
made Tinker and Moore an offer: They could negotiate a price to walk away from the contract, call the whole thing off.

Tinker still had faith in the show and stuck to it; he asked Dann to go ahead with it, taking his chances that it would become a hit with audiences and force CBS to continue with it. But Dann still got to choose the show’s spot on the fall prime-time schedule, a decision that could make or break the series’s future, and so far he had it set for a terrible slot. Dann knew the importance of a good time slot: “There’s no such thing as a good show with a bad rating,” he would say. “You always must win your time period.” So the clearest statement of his true feelings for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
came when his scheduling decisions were announced. Faced with intense competition from
rival NBC in the previous TV season, Dann put the show on Tuesdays, between the very incompatible
Beverly Hillbillies
and
Hee Haw,
and opposite NBC’s much-hyped
Don Knotts Show,
a variety hour starring the beloved Andy Griffith sidekick.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
was scheduled, essentially, to be finished after its thirteen episodes.

And the negative audience testing hadn’t changed CBS executives’ minds about that scheduling. With CBS still short of confidence in the show, the executives listened to all of the test audiences’ objections. They asked Tinker in for lots of meetings. He understood their trepidation: They had a thirteen-episode commitment, and that investment made them nervous. He tried to listen to their worries while letting his executive producers go about their business. But word was out in the industry: When Sandrich went to another studio to direct an episode of a different series, someone there told him CBS had a show called
Shane,
a Western series based on the movie, that it was preparing to put in
Mary Tyler Moore
’s slot when the latter inevitably failed. Even the producers, despite their general naïveté about the television business, knew they were dead in the time slot they’d been given.

Then things changed in the top ranks of CBS. Dann resigned to help launch the Children’s Television Workshop in New York, where production was beginning on a new kids’ show called
Sesame Street
. He’d been working in commercial broadcasting a long time, he told his colleagues, and he was rich enough to focus on doing something worthwhile with his career.

Of course, the move hadn’t come without urging from his network bosses. After fourteen consecutive years of ratings wins, CBS had fallen behind NBC’s new programs—most notably
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
—that packed, as industry parlance put it, “contemporary relevance” and were as glossy, sleek, and modern as Cher’s hair. Big-money advertisers now wanted those audiences, who’d been suddenly flocking to NBC. Even if CBS caught up to NBC in overall ratings, it had a devastating disadvantage in the key demographic.

And when a network needs a change of direction, a change in programming leadership signals that intention to the industry.

Robert Wood had just taken over as the network’s president after running its West Coast operations for a year; the often-frazzled executive defied the long tradition of network heads such as Jim Aubrey, Louis Cowan, and Merle Jones, who acted as if they came from nobility. Wood’s energy spilled out all around him. One of his first major acts as president was to promote Fred Silverman, at just thirty-three, from vice president of program planning to Dann’s old spot at the head of the programming department, and he started making changes. His mandate: Transform the network to attract cosmopolitan audiences in major cities. Television could no longer survive by appealing to rural viewers. Knockoffs of
The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan’s Island,
and
Gomer Pyle
were over. It wouldn’t be easy, of course. That was the nature of the business. Silverman joked, “
I firmly believe that people do respond to different things. I just wish I knew what they were.”

It turned out that, at least in this case, he did. Wood and Silverman would get credit for what became known as “the rural purge,” the cancellation and marginalization of several still-successful, but demographically less desirable, comedies, starting with
Lassie, Hee Haw,
and
Mayberry RFD
.
Green Acres
star Pat Buttram, who found his show moved out of its desirable slot and then axed, would lament that CBS had “
cancelled everything with a tree.” The edgier creatives in the business hailed Wood for killing what they saw as stale, irrelevant programming.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show
suddenly had some great advantages: its pronounced lack of trees and its air of sophistication. Perry Lafferty may not have supported Brooks and Burns as much as they would have liked at their big network pitch meeting, but the urbane CBS executive came to their aid now, urging Silverman to consider
Mary Tyler Moore
as just the sort of thing the network should nurture, and do more of. It felt current, positioned to capture the new, young demographics
TV needed to expand its audience. Social awareness and challenges to traditional values were what the network needed now. It was time for TV to stop ignoring the world around it.

Just months earlier, in March 1970,
a group of about one hundred feminists had made news by staging a sit-in at the office of
Ladies’ Home Journal
editor John Mack Carter to protest the way the magazine depicted women’s interests, and thus call attention to the importance of expanding women’s perceived roles beyond the homemaker. The number of single women in their late twenties and thirties was on the rise as more women delayed marriage or got divorced. Women’s lib was making headlines; it was cool and current. A show that demonstrated even a hint of women’s liberation and genuine artistry screamed
young, affluent, and urban
at a time when most sitcoms were still using feminism as nothing but a punch line.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show
went from dead-before-it-aired to potential network savior.

Fred Silverman flew to Los Angeles from his office in New York in the late summer of 1970, just a month before the new fall lineup would premiere, to screen some of the shows he’d inherited from Mike Dann’s reign. He hadn’t yet seen
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. By that time, the entire East Coast office of CBS had written the show off, but he was intrigued by Lafferty’s lobbying on its behalf. He wanted to see it for himself.

Silverman watched the pilot and a rough cut of the second and third episodes, with Ethel Winant and a few other executives by his side. He thought all three episodes were terrific. In fact, he thought you’d have to be a complete moron not to see that it was a great show. Now he had a problem, however: This show he loved sat in his schedule’s worst time period, on its way to oblivion.

He called his boss, Bob Wood, back in New York, even though it was now Friday evening on the East Coast. Winant, in the room with Silverman at the time, held her breath, not knowing what her new boss
was going to say about the show to his boss. “Bob, I just screened
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
” he told Wood. “You know where we’ve got it on the schedule? It’s going to get killed there, and this is the kind of show we’ve got to support. We ought to think about moving this thing. We have a bunch of junk on Saturday night. We ought to move one of those hillbilly shows and put this there.”

With that,
Green Acres
was packed off to Tuesday nights, and
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
was set to air at 9:30 p.m. on Saturdays, as part of a lineup that included two top-twenty shows,
My Three Sons
and
Mannix,
as well as
Mission: Impossible
. Instead of facing
Andy Griffith
favorite Don Knotts and
Mod Squad,
Mary would compete with the new (and destined to be short-lived) ABC drama
The Most Deadly Game
and NBC’s movie night. These were much better odds. Fred Silverman had rescued
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
from a quiet Tuesday night death. When Wood announced his sweeping changes, which included the
Mary Tyler Moore
move, on July 21, 1970, the
Boston Globe
called it a “
wholesale upheaval” of the network schedule, “unprecedented for so late in the season.” But, writer Percy Shain noted, “the strategy involved in these transfers is obscure.” No one in the industry was entirely sure yet what CBS was up to.