Last time, I left you all with something of a poser. Clips from three episodes of Mary are sitting on YouTube in various forms. Are these the same three episodes which were broadcast back in 1978?
Certainly, most people seem to have either assumed that they are, or are simply uninterested in whether they are or not. Let’s take a look again at the YouTube video “Why Mary Tyler Moore’s 1978 “Mary” Bombed Big Time”:
The narration certainly leaves us in no doubt about what they think about poor Mary:
“From what I saw, there were two things which caused this programme to nosedive and crash so quickly. The writing was bad. At times, really bad.”
We then get a clip of Mary talking to the studio audience: “Let’s talk about Canada!”. Followed inevitably by a song about Canada. Neither works very well in clip form, I will admit, although I could make the best show in the world look bad by slagging it off and then throwing in a few clips out-of-context.
We are then told:
“So much of the comedy I saw felt forced, and simply wasn’t funny.”
Followed by part of an unidentified sketch featuring Mary, Swoosie, and Judith sitting on a sofa:
SWOOSIE KURTZ: Without another person.
JUDITH KAHAN: Just you.
SWOOSIE KURTZ: Solo.
JUDITH KAHAN: Uno.
SWOOSIE KURTZ: Solitary.
JUDITH KAHAN: Like mouldy cheese.
If anything, there is even less context given to this clip, so it’s simply impossible to judge it fairly. So let’s do the donkeywork ourselves. Where do these clips come from?
The answer: another video on YouTube, worryingly titled “‘Mary’ unknown episode 1978”.
The above video includes both the Canada material, and the sketch with Judith and Swoosie on the sofa, called “Not A Married Woman”. I think all the material comes across much better when watched in context. But that’s not really the point.
Because something else immediately becomes clear while watching this video: we’re not looking at a finished programme here. This is a studio tape, featuring raw footage of a studio audience session for the programme, including retakes. It also isn’t even complete – it ends halfway through a sketch. And needless to say, the completed programme isn’t available anywhere else online.
So our question is now slightly different: does this studio tape represent something which became a finished programme which transmitted on CBS in 1978?
* * *
To find that out, we have to take a look at how contemporary newspapers reported the contents of each of the three episodes actually broadcast of Mary, through the many previews and reviews of the show. The following is not meant to be in any way complete; a flavour of each show will do for our purposes.
Episode 1 (CBS TX: 24th September 1978)
The first show is easy to know the contents of; Jay Sharbutt of the Associated Press gave a rundown of pretty much the entire thing as a preview the day before the show aired, which was reprinted in many papers across the nation.
- The Ed Asner Dancers
- Carl Reiner as guest, presiding over “an anniversary tribute to the first 25 minutes of the show”
- The cast’s “audition tapes”
- A dry cleaning skit
- Mary singing “Misty” (deliberately ineptly), and then “We’ve Only Just Begun” (eptly)
Episode 2 (CBS TX: 1st October 1978)
Taken from the billing published on the day of TX in The Los Angeles Times, and from a review published in the Democrat and Chronicle on the 8th October.1
- Miss America at Lunch
- A skit about rats “maimed and disfigured in laboratory tests”, which turns into a musical number
- Mary playing Jenny, a girl who refuses to eat her vegetables, with Dick Shawn as her overbearing brother
- David Letterman planning his own birthday party
Episode 3 (CBS TX: 8th October 1978)
Again, taken from the billing published on the day of TX in The Los Angeles Times, along with billings from the San Francisco Chronicle and Syracuse Herald Journal on the same day.
- A look at the singles bar scene
- A parody of the strength and durability of luggage as depicted in television commercials
- A musical item about the foibles of modern-day banking as seen through the average depositor
- A Mary and Swoozie duet: “It’s a Heartache” and “No Way to Treat a Lady”
The contents of the first episode listed here matches the clips on YouTube which are labelled as the first show, so no problem there.
But neither of the other two episodes match the material in the video embedded earlier in this article, labelled “‘Mary’ unknown episode 1978”. Clearly, that material has to be raw footage of a studio session for an episode which never made it to air2: remember, eight had been taped but not transmitted, as The Los Angeles Times reported on the 9th October 1978.
In other words, finally dragging this article to the damn point: while it’s fair enough to criticise the Canada material, or the “Not A Married Woman” sketch, you surely have to do it within the explicit context of material which was never broadcast. You can’t talk about what “caused this programme to nosedive and crash so quickly” unless you’re willing to admit that you are dealing with material which the viewing public never saw back in 1978. You are simply not judging the same show which was beamed into people’s homes nearly 50 years ago.
Indeed, even if Mary not been cancelled after three episodes, we don’t have proof that all of this material would even have been broadcast. It hasn’t gone through the whole production process; there is a reasonable chance that any given sketch in this video may not have made it through to the final edit. Who knows? When we’re talking about unfinished, unbroadcast programmes, you have to be extremely careful about how you use them in your critique, above and beyond a normal programme. Whether you want to use this material to slag the show off or to defend it is irrelevant.
The problem is, with Mary, it seems like virtually everybody makes this mistake. For instance, take a look at the following 13 Week Theatre episode on the show:
Again, the narration intones:
“Mary debuted at 8pm on Sunday night, September 24th 1978. The result was, as [Grant] Tinker had predicted, a disaster.”
We then get Mary Tyler Moore doing her rendition of Loudon Wainwright III’s “Dead Skunk”, which is one of my favourite things in all the Mary material we have to hand, and if you don’t find it amusing, we can’t be friends. But again, the main point here is that this simply never transmitted at the time. Which is bad enough, but the preceding narration in the 13 Week Theatre video makes it sound like Mary‘s first episode opened with “Dead Skunk”.
It’s at best careless. Treating all the material from Mary online as an amorphous blob of stuff, with no regard as to what it actually represents, is not a good way to approach television history.
* * *
So that’s two episodes of Mary covered; one with clips of the first episode transmitted, and one featuring material which never aired. But if you recall, I said that there were clips from at least three episodes online. And the third episode – footage of which also appears in the 13 Week Theatre video above – is perhaps the most interesting of all.
Join me next time for the exciting conclusion.
With thanks to Tanya Jones.
Yes, it was specifically talking about the second episode here, not the third one, broadcast that evening. ↩
Although we’re working with slightly incomplete information here, I’m confident enough to make this statement. Remember, there’s a double-whammy of proof here: sketches present in that video aren’t mentioned in contemporary newspapers, and sketches which are mentioned in those papers aren’t present in that video. If any of that material had aired, I would have found at least one reference to it. ↩