On the 24th September 1978, a brand new Mary Tyler Moore variety series premiered on CBS. Simply titled Mary1, there was a full season order in place; many reports at the time suggested at least 22 shows, with an option for two more.
After three shows aired, the show was pulled from the airwaves for good.
This article is partly the tale of what happened to poor Mary. But more importantly: it’s also about the pitfalls of judging a series nearly five decades later, when the detritus surrounding a show can be extremely difficult to interpret correctly.
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There was an extremely obvious format which Mary could have gone for: something akin to How to Survive the 70s from seven months earlier. Numerous guest stars, perhaps a different, fairly loose topic every week, job done. Instead, Mary seemed to go out of its way to make life difficult for itself.
Guest stars were mainly eschewed, aside from a brief appearance by Carl Reiner in the opening episode. Instead, they went for a repertory cast, some quite well known, others at the start of their career: James Hampton, Swoosie Kurtz, David Letterman, Michael Keaton, Judy Kahan, and – the most famous of the gang at the time – Dick Shawn. This, at least, had some precedence: surrounding Mary with a solid team was one of the things which made The Mary Tyler Moore Show such a success.
Mary herself described the series as the following at the time, which was widely quoted in the press:
“The show will be made up primarily of sketches which hopefully display wit and grown-up comedy. There will also be some music and dancing but most of the numbers will grown out of the preceding sketch. For instance, a disco sketch evolves into a disco number. It’s a new form for me and I just love it.”
Some clips from the first episode are on YouTube. Sadly, as it’s not the full show, it doesn’t really give a full sense of proceedings; oddly enough, it seems determined not to let us see much of the actual singing or dancing. But it does at least give some kind of idea of the kind of programme Mary was.
If you are to believe how many people talk about Mary today, the show was a complete creative disaster. In a 2023 YouTube video titled “Why Mary Tyler Moore’s 1978 “Mary” Bombed Big Time”, the narration starts with:
“How could Mary, with her two monster hit shows behind her, and that cast, not stop and instinctually say: “Hey, these skits and the jokes belong in a local cable access show, not on my primetime programme?”
The blog Nifty Niblets summarised Mary in 2014 with the following:
“Has there ever been a show with this much collective talent on screen — television legend Mary Tyler Moore, a guy who later became a legend in Letterman, very talented actor Keaton, very talented singer and actor Swoosie Kurtz, and we haven’t even mentioned the solid Dick Shawn — that was so bad?”
OK, so how about the book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted (Simon & Schuster, 2013) – surely a tome which is preternaturally disposed to be sympathetic to Mary Tyler Moore?
“The show faltered from the start, trying to combine sincere musical numbers with the “edgy” humor that made Saturday Night Live popular. To wit, one memorable number had Keaton and Letterman dressed up like characters from a scene in Deliverance, singing the Village People song ‘Macho Man.'”
The book goes on to quote one single contemporary review of the show, by Bob Moore in The Palm Beach Post. It starts with “it’s enough to make you cry”, and ends with the phrase “inferior talent”.
Now, not even I will attempt to paint Mary as a success per se. A show intended to run for at least 22 weeks, pulled after three – how could that be anything other than a failure? Nor am I trying to say that people aren’t allowed their own opinions on the show. Of course they are.
It’s just worth pointing out, lest history be completely rewritten: not everybody hated Mary at the time. Indeed, plenty of the previews and reviews in the contemporary press were positively glowing. For instance, the day before the first episode aired, Howard Rosenberg wrote the following in The Los Angeles Times:
“The huge delight of the new season has to be “Mary,” a smooth-humming Rolls-Royce of a vehicle that delivers the multi-talented Mary Tyler Moore to us after her one-season absence from weekly television.
Not since Julie Andrews and company transformed Wednesday evenings on ABC into a weekly Noel Coward party six years ago has there been a variety show of such scintillating promise as “Mary.” It debuts on CBS at 8 Sunday night, where it will need all its freshness and skilfully crafted comedy to compete against ABC’s “Battlestar Galactica” and NBC’s 26 hours of “Centennial,” which starts Oct. 1. […]
Such energy, inventiveness, and all-out fun. A few flat spots are eclipsed by such delicious bits as the portly Ed Asner Dancers and a spoof of all those anniversary specials on television. This time the tribute is for the first 25 minutes of “Mary” and features wavy kinescope-style clips from the first half of the show and a few gracious words from “the president of CBS,” who only 25 minutes ago was an usher.”
Or how about Sylvia Lawler in Pennsylvania’s The Morning Call, the day after transmission:
“Forget those earlier variety specials of hers, so modishly abstract they should have been entered in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit.2 Mary Tyler Moore is back in inimitable stylish form and the world seems a little less tarnished.
Her new song-dance-sketch series, “Mary” fairly bounded into primetime last night. It exhibited the verve, class and taste of her lamented retired comedy series and enough of the old, self-deprecating “Gee, Uh-Whiz” Mary to make us feel at home from the start.”
Nor were these positive reviews only published in the opening week of the show. On the 6th October, a couple of days before the third (and final) edition of the show aired, Bob Talbert of Detroit Free Press wrote what I think is one of the strongest defences for Mary:
“After seeing her first show, I wrote last week that America needs Mary’s variety hour. After seeing this past Sunday’s, I’m even more firmly convinced that this is a show America needs to see every week. […]
The ensemble players are settling into their characters. Mary is the Mary we’ve always loved, but my hasn’t she grown up? She still represents the nice person in us all. The person we wish we could be.
Nice and vulnerable. MTM has to be vulnerable for us to love her so, because we, too, are vulnerable. In the previous song-and-dance specials they tinkered around with, Mary came off flat because they left out the niceness and vulnerability – the traits that create Mary’s humor, and our love for her.
This time they’ve kept those traits in, and they work wonders. Mary’s a fine singer and an excellent dancer, but they haven’t forced that on us this trip, letting us discover it out of humorous situations from which the songs and dances come. […]
Last week I was worried about “Battlestar Galactica” zapping poor Mary in the ratings. But I know this, we’ll be watching “Mary” five years from now, and Lorne Greene and crew will have found earth by then or be off the air.”
Bob is being rather over-optimistic at the end there, but I think his love for the show rings out as genuine, and is exactly the kind of view which is generally skipped over when discussing Mary these days, in favour of it “obviously” being dreadful.
Of course, I would be entirely misrepresenting matters if I didn’t admit that some reviewers gave the show absolutely appalling notices. The ones which bordered on abuse are frankly the least interesting. But some people, like Chris Wise in The Sacremento Union, tried a little harder to pinpoint the problems. He wrote the following, also published on the 6th October:
“There is nothing wrong with Mary but there is something wrong with “Mary.”
“Mary” is the new CBS variety series which stars Mary Tyler Moore and can be seen Sunday nights at 8 on channel 10. It’s available but most of the audience seems to prefer either “Battlestar Galactica” on 13 or “Centennial” on 3.
Last week, in the national Nielsen sampling, the two opposition shows had a total of 81 percent of the available viewing audience. That left “Mary” with less than a 19 share and a lot of worries.
Moore, her husband Grant Tinker, their MTM production company and CBS may be able to turn things around when “Centennial” gives way to “Weekend” for one Sunday later this month. Even so, the show is going to have to improve a bit.
The upcoming “Mary” is typical of what we’ve seen so far this season. There is a bright cast, some funny situations, some good musical numbers and the star herself. Yet, somehow, it fails to click. Somehow, something is off.
Each segment of the show is good. Some are great. But they do not blend. The show fails to flow and there is an abrupt change from one segment to another.”
In other words: in Chris Wise’s opinion it would be too simplistic to either blame strong competition in the slot from the other networks, or the quality of Mary itself. Both factors were to blame.
Things came to a head on the 9th October 1978, the day after the third show aired. The Los Angeles Times reported the following:
“The distress flags are flying at “Mary,” the new CBS variety series starring Mary Tyler Moore.
After a staggering plunge in the ratings – from 27th place the first week to 57th the second, a loss of more than five million households – CBS announced Friday that the show won’t be seen Oct. 15 and Oct. 22 as originally scheduled. And Moore’s production company, on hiatus last week, said it will be off this week too, and possibly longer, while the creative staff decides how to change the show.
A CBS executive who requested anonymity said the show’s poor second outing Oct. 1 against ABC’s “Battlestar Galactica” and the three-hour debut of NBC’S “Centennial” had started discussions at the network about moving “Mary” to a different time slot. The preemptions will give CBS programmers time to plan a scheduling strategy for the series.
There is no thought at this point of cancelling “Mary,” the official said, because CBS has ordered 22 shows (three have aired and eight others have been taped).
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Moore’s production company said, the writers and producers of the series will be refining and possibly revising it to boost its popularity. They are reacting not only to Nielsen ratings but also to negative mail and reviews, he said.”
When somebody has to say the words “there is no thought at this point of cancelling Mary“, then you know it’s all over bar the shouting. While some papers reported that Mary would return on the 29th October after a break of two weeks, this never happened.3
Instead, there was a break of five months. Mary Tyler Moore then came back with a show called The Mary Tyler Moore Hour on the 4th March 1979. If you squint, you could say it was a “refining” of Mary. But frankly, it was such a different proposition that it’s easier to think of The Mary Tyler Moore Hour as an entirely different show. (A show I’ll cover separately at some point down the line.)
So that’s poor old Mary done. Three episodes and out. But there’s something vitally important in that Los Angeles Times piece above. Something which will have huge repercussions when it comes to how people judge the show today.
The key phrase: “three have aired and eight others have been taped”.
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Three editions of Mary were broadcast by CBS, back in 1978. Sitting on YouTube today, there are also clips from three editions of Mary. They’re surely the same three, right?
More next time.
This is not Mary’s 1985 sitcom, also called Mary. ↩
Mind you, as you might suspect from my article on Mary’s earlier variety work, I feel Lawler is indulging in a little of her own rewriting of history here. Mary’s Incredible Dream can credibly be described as “modishly abstract”, but How to Survive the 70s really can’t. And let’s remember, How to Survive the 70s was two years later than Incredible Dream.
TV gets forgotten and misrepresented so quickly, whatever the era. ↩
So what was parachuted into the schedules instead of Mary? The aforementioned Los Angeles Times article reveals all: “To replace “Mary” Sunday, CBS has moved “All in the Family” and “Alice” up one hour each to fill the 8-9 p.m. period, and the 9-10 p.m. slot will be taken by “Dallas,” which normally airs Saturdays. “All in the Family” and “Alice” will also take the “Mary” slot Oct. 22, followed by a two-hour TV movie, “Like Mom, Like Me,” starring Linda Lavin and Kristy McNichol.” ↩