Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (18 page)

The Rainone boys planned to go to Los Angeles for a week anyway. They’d find other things to do.

Halfway through the show’s first season, fate, with an assist from CBS president Bob Wood, threw
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
another bit of luck. It came in the form of a similarly progressive new show called
All in the Family.
After ABC had rejected two pilots for Norman Lear’s comedy about a blue-collar family, Wood bought the show for CBS and decided to premiere it in January 1971 during what was known as TV’s “second season,” the second half of the traditional September-through-May broadcast schedule. The time when “replacements” were rolled out to take the place of failing fall shows was becoming increasingly important as networks grew more obsessed with playing the “ratings game,” as they called it. Wood, Fred Silverman, and their fellow executives loved the
All in the Family
pilot, though their boss, William Paley—the cantankerous chief executive who’d been with CBS since its radio days—
hated it. He would allow Wood to put it on only if he buried it in a deadly time slot on Tuesday, the same wasteland
Mary Tyler Moore
was once rescued from. (Paley was perhaps even more obsessed with the bottom line than his colleagues at other television networks; he once grumbled to a shareholders’ meeting that covering unexpected news—space launches, Churchill’s death—
had reduced earnings by six cents a share.) But soon the show would get the chance to team up with Mary and company, once Wood had the ammunition to stand up to Paley.

Lear had started writing for television in the early days of variety
shows—Jack Haley’s
Ford Star Revue
and Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s
Colgate Comedy Hour
. He’d long since found his own comedic voice in films, however, and was nominated for an Oscar in 1967 for his script for
Divorce American Style
. Around the same time, he heard about the British sitcom
’Till Death Do Us Part
—about the tension between a middle-aged conservative at odds with his new, liberal son-in-law—and wished he could get the same sort of topical satire on U.S. television.

In January 1971, four years later, Lear finally got his remake onto American airwaves, and critics quickly agreed that
All in the Family
reached new heights for television comedy. CBS premiered the show with a careful disclaimer: “The program you are about to see is
All in the Family
. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show—in a mature fashion—just how absurd they are.” The show tackled race relations, sex, politics, women’s rights, and every other issue facing the country—and it did so forcefully, directly, and with loads of ethnic slurs, like no show on television ever had. Its spot-on casting helped it go down smoothly, with Carroll O’Connor playing the cigar-chomping Archie Bunker, balanced by the over-the-top antics of Rob Reiner as his son-in-law, Mike, Sally Struthers as daddy’s girl, Gloria, and Jean Stapleton as daffy wife, Edith.

Lear attributed his show’s artistic triumph to the network’s “
patient capital.” After all, ABC wouldn’t even take a chance on him. As Lear would later recount in a speech: “If CBS, in the person of Bob Wood, hadn’t understood that a fresh entertainment menu was needed at CBS for success in the long term . . . if the network hadn’t dropped all the constraints of numbers-driven management just long enough for
All in the Family
to get in the door . . . if they hadn’t taken a leap of faith by ignoring the ‘hard’ numerical data of the research which said that America would not find Archie Bunker entertaining—the test results were the absolute lowest—they would have effectively squelched whatever innovation we were fortunate enough to bring to television comedy.”

A month after
All in the Family
’s premiere, however, viewers weren’t interested yet; the show placed last in its time slot in the Nielsen ratings. And yet it was one of the seventeen shows CBS kept on its schedule when, inspired by the new direction
Mary Tyler Moore
and
All in the Family
represented,
Wood killed more programs than any other president in the history of the network. His schedule overhaul, announced in March 1971, was even bolder than his changes the year before. He dropped thirteen shows, including what was then TV’s longest-running series ever, the twenty-three-year-old
Ed Sullivan Show
. Only
Medical Center,
the
Thursday Night Movie,
Doris Day’s show, and
Mary Tyler Moore
would stay in their time slots for the following fall. New shows featuring Dick Van Dyke, Glenn Ford, and Sandy Duncan would be among the new crop.

It wasn’t until the 1971 Emmys, given out in May, that both
All in the Family
and
Mary Tyler Moore
started to gain traction with larger audiences. The
All in the Family
cast appeared in a popular skit during the Emmy broadcast, and the sitcom won three major awards, including Outstanding Comedy and Outstanding New Series—beating
Mary Tyler Moore
for both.
Mary Tyler Moore
won four—Asner and Harper for acting, Brooks and Burns for writing, Sandrich for directing. Rafkin was nominated for his work on the “Support Your Local Mother” episode, but lost to Sandrich. Rafkin had a hard time feeling bad about losing though: He was sitting next to Asner when Sandrich’s name was announced; Asner squeezed Rafkin’s arm and said, “
You know there’ll be other times.” After Sandrich accepted the award, he told Rafkin, “I just want you to know that the only reason I won was because I directed more episodes than you.”

In their acceptance speeches, Asner and Harper referred to the cast as a “family,” Sandrich paid tribute to Brooks and Burns, and Burns gave the credit right back to the actors: “The best scripts in the world are nothing without the kind of cast we have.”

After the Emmys, both shows, particularly
All in the Family,
shot up the ratings charts as viewers sought out their summer reruns. Wood could make his case to Paley:
All in the Family
was a phenomenon. Paley had to agree; Wood got the go-ahead to swap
All in the Family
into the Saturday night schedule. Silverman started to envision his network as ruled by two basic schools of equally classy, but distinct, comedy. One would be the
Mary Tyler Moore
style, with character-driven plots and film production values; the other would be the
All in the Family
style, with politically charged, edgier plots and a gritty, taped feel. He felt there was room for both, and he was right:
All in the Family
shot to No. 1 on the Nielsen ratings charts and stayed there; it both benefited from and helped boost
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
.

After that Emmy push,
All in the Family
topped the Nielsen ratings charts for its first five seasons and created TV-to-talk-about almost every week. It also helped lift
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
from No. 22 in its first season to No. 10 in its second. The combination of the two shows elevated the night to become one of the best lineups in television history. From start to finish, Saturday night on CBS looked smart and funny and sophisticated. With the help of other hits throughout the week like
The Waltons,
CBS now dominated the network rankings again.

All in the Family
also challenged the
Mary Tyler Moore
producers to make every episode the best it could be. Producer David Davis would come over to Jim Brooks’s apartment to watch
All in the Family
and analyze its every move. They felt like they were watching history from the first episode. “Man, they’re so great,” they’d always say to each other, “and we feel a little inferior.” Then, just like the rest of America, they’d watch
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. They’d have to admit, that one wasn’t so bad, either.

(1971–72)

Ed Asner realized he finally felt good about his new job late in the summer of 1971. He was waiting, along with Ted Knight and Gavin MacLeod, backstage for the first studio audience taping of the second season, listening to the familiar theme song play as they awaited their introductions. Peeking out at the cheering crowd, confident in the show’s upward trajectory, Asner sighed. “Man, I can die happy now.”

“Hold on, sweetheart,” MacLeod cracked. “We haven’t won
our
Emmys yet.” Knight, silent,
wanted
that Emmy, too, and he was determined to get it.

The good news: It was starting to look like they’d have their shot.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
was growing into a full-fledged phenomenon. As the women’s lib movement went mainstream—
Ms.
magazine, Gloria Steinem, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Title IX—and
All in the Family
shocked audiences far more than a single lady could, people stopped worrying so much about Mary slipping into old-maidhood.
Even
TV Guide,
which had once described her as “unmarried and getting a little desperate about it,” encapsulated the change in attitude she’d helped perpetuate when it later declared that she was “
thirty-three, unmarried, and unworried—Mary is the liberated woman’s ideal.” The magazine put Moore on its cover three times in the show’s first two years on the air.

The stars—and even the writers—became the subjects of incessant publicity in the likes of the
Hollywood Reporter, TV Guide,
and
Mademoiselle,
rivaled in coverage only by the stars of
All in the Family
. They were recognized everywhere they went. They were besieged by fans desperate to talk to their favorite stars but lacking in anything to say besides telling Harper she looked much prettier in person (a good sport, she took it as a compliment) or asking Asner stuff like, “Why are you so mean to Mary?” He had a stock answer, grumbling, “Yeah, yeah, every boss in the world should be so mean to his Mary.” It was a pain in the ass and tiresome, but, they felt, a fair price for being on a hit show.

Shockingly famous people were now not only consenting to appear on the show, but requesting to. Walter Cronkite, watched by more than
20 million viewers every night, played himself and told the stars he was a fan of the show. When he spent his weekends sailing, he’d bring his boat into port every Saturday night, he said, in time to watch. He also took a particular interest in Leachman; MacLeod was certain that America’s most trusted newsman had a crush on the flighty actress. Singer Carole King also appeared on the show, playing a family member of Mary’s boyfriend, whose son Mary doesn’t like. The woman whose plaintive songs—“So Far Away” and “It’s Too Late”—had crackled through the cast’s and writers’ stereo speakers had volunteered herself for a low-key appearance on their show, just to be with them for a week. She was credited as Carole Larkey, using her married name, and the network didn’t promote it as a huge pop star’s guest appearance; they played it like just another episode.

The writers, meanwhile, collected praise and attention like few TV
writers had ever enjoyed. Everyone from critics to Emmy voters to the actors themselves heaped praise on the artful writing, a concept still rare in television. After all, just nine years earlier, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow famously chastised broadcasters for their perpetuation of a “vast wasteland.” Now viewers planned their Saturday nights around
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and
All in the Family,
and felt no guilt in the pleasure.