MARY RICHARDS: I think you had a dream. You dreamed that you started from nowhere, and you made it all the way to the top. Became rich, successful in every way, loved… and recently, you’ve begun to become aware that time is slipping away, and your life has turned out a little differently from the dream. In fact, compared to the dream, you think your life isn’t all that terrific. And it’s begun to bother you.
TED BAXTER: That’s amazing, Mary. How did you know that was my problem?
MARY RICHARDS: Ted, that’s everybody’s problem. I had a dream once. I dreamed of becoming a ballerina. Took so many classes, I practiced so hard. In the hopes one day I’d dance with the finest ballet company, and I’d win the cheers of audiences all over the world.
TED BAXTER: So you wanted to be a real famous dancer. And you wound up as the producer of a local news show.
MARY RICHARDS: That’s right.
TED BAXTER: Boy, you really blew it.
– The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Hail the Conquering Gordy”,
CBS TX: 5th February 1977“I think I’ll always consider myself a failed dancer, not a successful actress.”
– Mary Tyler Moore, The Los Angeles Times, 20th December 1981
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When it comes to Mary Tyler Moore’s variety programmes, I always get a little confused by some of the contemporary reaction to them.
For instance, here’s Frank Swertlow in his syndicated Chicago Sun Times column from September 1978, after her variety series Mary premiered:
“For the longest time, it seems that Mary Tyler Moore has tried to prove she is a musical comedy star and not merely a funny woman in a situation comedy.
Pathetically, each of her attempts at a variety show fails miserably. She seems to lack the self-knowledge to realize she isn’t a song-and-dance lady.”
Mary herself seemed to end up agreeing with Frank, at least to some extent. Her description of herself as a “failed dancer” is one she would repeatedly end up returning to in interviews over the years. It’s become something which many people accept as true without a second thought.
But I think Mary did a disservice to herself, and I certainly think that critics did too. Let’s take the most obvious issue with all this: at every turn, The Dick Van Dyke Show proved that she very much was a song-and-dance lady. That show transformed into variety at the drop of a hat, and Mary held her own against Dick Van Dyke every single time.
The best example of this is the episode where the show threw caution to the winds, and became a full-blown entertainment extravaganza: “The Alan Brady Show Presents”, broadcast by CBS on the 18th December 1963.
Even just considering her work on shows like the above, Mary Tyler Moore as a star of variety was not some bizarre, left-turn event.
But we can go further than that. Over a ten year period after The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Tyler Moore starred in three variety specials. All three have something to recommend them, and one in particular is one of my very favourite things Mary Tyler Moore ever did in her entire career. Sadly, none of them ever had a proper DVD release, which is a huge shame.
All three are available – in varying quality – on YouTube, however. Let’s take a look at what I think is a truly underappreciated part of Mary’s work.
Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman
CBS TX: 13th April 1969
“There was a sweetness and a gentleness to the Van Dyke opus and when he and Mary Tyler Moore sang a special song, “Life is Just a Situation Comedy,” you have the feeling they believed it.
Mary danced up a storm in a sequence about females through the century, the age of the flapper and of Rosie the Riveter. And there was a fine, funny production number in a ski lodge where the dancers had a leg in a cast and swirled on crutches. […]
It was a fresh and charming hour and somewhere along the way Dick said, “It’s like returning to your old neighborhood,” which it was.”
– Cecil Smith, The Los Angeles Times, 14th April 1969
We start off with the show which is widely credited with rescuing Mary Tyler Moore from a career in bad films and worse plays, and which was responsible for her getting a chance to make The Mary Tyler Moore Show the following year. And already we can see how history has been rewritten; if the above is true, then how is Mary Tyler Moore as variety star such a ridiculous idea?
This special really is great fun, and Mary is clearly evoking the spirit of Laura Petrie in early number “Life is Like a Situation Comedy” far more than in most of her later variety turns. The show really does seem to be designed to say “Remember Mary Tyler Moore in The Dick Van Dyke Show? Wasn’t she great?” Luckily, the answer is definitely “Yes”. But we even end the show with the strains of the familiar Dick Van Dyke music.
The worst segment here is easy: a “Food Medley” of various songs to do with eating, which comes across as just mildly irritating. The best is harder: the aforementioned “Life is Like a Situation Comedy” is catchy fun, although the most interesting is probably Dick and Mary as figures on a wedding cake, with accompanying song “Do You Love Me?”.
But the show leaves the best moment until last, with a previously unseen moment from The Dick Van Dyke Show: an alternate take from the Season 5 episode “You Ought to Be in Pictures”, where we see Rob crying after being sacked from the movie he was working on. This is apparently how Dick wanted to play the scene, but wasn’t allowed; the point being that unlike women, it was extremely rare to show a male lead crying on television at the time. Which is something you could write a book on in itself.
This segment presages all the deleted scenes which appeared over a decade later on LaserDisc, and in a more mass-market fashion with DVDs nearly 30 years later. And it points the way towards how television could still dig interesting things out of the archive right now, and present them to a mass audience. You’ve just got to find the right way to do it.
Having a smiling Dick Van Dyke introduce it, with Mary Tyler Moore adding “You gotta see this”? That works. And it belongs in a show labelled “variety” just as much as the singing and dancing.
Mary’s Incredible Dream
CBS TX: 22nd January 1976
Billed as “30 glittering production numbers that depict a musical story of man’s past, present and future”, even I as a card-carrying fan of Mary as variety star have to admit that the phrase “mixed reaction” was designed for this show.
Cecil Smith in The Los Angeles Times, clearly a Mary Tyler Moore fan, called it “the most vivacious, the most original, the most delightful musical special of the year”. Jay Sharbutt of the Associated Press suggested that “Even a good analyst couldn’t figure it out”, and that “Miss Moore and the dancers indulge in sequences so frenzied one suspects a saboteur put itching powder in their knickers”. Variety called it “a bad wasteful show” and “a production so tasteless it will be a while before she recovers”.
The show’s reputation only got worse as the years went on. A 2009 review of the show which I’m not going to link to suggests that the only sensible response to it was beating Mary Tyler Moore senseless, which I would suggest says more unpleasant things about the reviewer than about the show itself.
One thing is clear: there was certainly a rethink regarding Mary’s Incredible Dream after it was first recorded. On the day of broadcast, Bob Thomas of the Associated Press reported that production on the show had started a year earlier, in early 1975. Mary Tyler Moore explained what happened:
“…nothing was eliminated. But one number in a field near Malibu didn’t have the right lighting and had to be reshot. Also, we needed clarification of the whole concept, to allow the viewers a better understanding of the movement from scene to scene. So we taped a new beginning to show that it was all my dream.”
The show wasn’t delayed quite as much as this makes it sound; the Los Angeles Times reported in April 1975 that the show was due to air “next fall”, so it’s a maximum of four months. But that report also stated the original title was The Creation of the Universe and the History of the World as Seen by Mary Tyler Moore in an Hour. In other words: the entire dream framing material – not just the beginning of the show – was a last-minute fix.
To be honest, I have to say I really enjoy the show. If it’s a folly, I find it a hugely entertaining one. If it’s pretentious… well, maybe, but that also sounds extremely close to telling Mary to simply “stay in her lane”, and I’d rather people with commissioning clout made outrageously ambitious things like this instead.
It’s also a programme with the kind of production values which would really benefit from a proper, high-quality release, rather than the scruffy off-air that we currently have to endure. I would suggest it’s difficult to fully appreciate the show through the current analogue and digital fuzz it’s been reduced to.
Ultimately, you can like, hate, or be ambivalent about Mary’s Incredible Dream. But one thing is for sure: TV is certainly not in a better place now for not even trying to make programmes like this.
How to Survive the 70s and Maybe Even Bump Into Happiness
CBS TX: 22nd February 1978
“It has been little more than two years since Mary Tyler Moore entered the calm waters of the comedy-variety special, emerging on the crest of a tidal wave called “Mary’s Incredible Dream,” that magnificent, sumptuous, wildly original Biblical history of mankind through song and dance. And it flopped, resoundingly.
Miss Moore has scaled down her sights with her second CBS special […] Here, unlike the “Incredible Dream,” she is working more or less within the traditional variety guidelines. But to say that this show is less ambitious does not detract from its overall style or the versatile abilities of its star.
This is high-class entertainment with a provocative theme. In this case, we’re dealing with the Self Help-Self Realization syndrome of the ’70s, a gentle satire poking fun at the sometimes bizarre lengths we travel in our never-ending quest to become Total Human Beings.
– James Brown, The Los Angeles Times, 22nd February 1978
As much as I love Mary’s Incredible Dream, this is like going from the ridiculous to the sublime. I get the distinct impression that these days, How to Survive the 70s is the least well-known of Mary’s forays into variety. Which is a great shame. Because for me, it’s by far the best. This show has an ease to it that not even Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman quite managed, let alone Incredible Dream.
Highlights here are many: if you ever wanted to see John Ritter do a three-minute skit on answering machines, this is the show for you. There’s also a lovely non-verbal sketch with Dick Van Dyke and missed romance in a lift. And if you can’t enter into the spirit of the astrological musical number, I can’t help you.
But for me, the standout here is “This is the Rest of Your Life”, a This is Your Life parody where Mary finds out that she repeatedly ends up doing… weak carbon copies of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I would suggest that any idea that Mary wasn’t hyper-aware of herself, her career, and the industry as a whole is dispelled by this amazing sketch.
Similarly: if anyone thinks Mary Tyler Moore couldn’t do variety, I would urge them to watch this special. Everything about this works. And the running theme – done satirically, but with a light touch – ties the whole show together wonderfully.
* * *
Seven months after How to Survive the 70s was broadcast, in September 1978, Mary Tyler Moore’s brand new variety series launched. Simply titled Mary, you would think the format of the show would be obvious, from the creative success of the show we’ve just watched. Tackle a different theme each week, have some guest stars to liven things up, some relaxed talking to camera from Moore, job done.
Instead, Mary took a different tack. And it lasted just three weeks on air. Next time, we take a look at the biggest television disaster of Mary Tyler Moore’s career.
With thanks to Tanya Jones.