My recent four-part analysis of Mary was one of the hardest things I’ve ever written for Dirty Feed. When I’m writing stupid shit about The Young Ones, I have a base level of knowledge about the show in my head. With Mary, I was writing virtually from scratch, and that’s before you even get into disentangling fact and fiction surrounding the show.
But truth be told, I could have easily written ten articles about poor, maligned Mary. There’s simply so much to say about it, and a huge amount of contemporary newspaper reporting. I wrote a version of the first article which was almost twice as long, with twice as many review quotes. But I did want at least some readers to get to the end of the article without giving up.
Which means there’s shitloads of stuff I left out of those pieces. So let’s take one more trip back to the blog Tune in Tonight!, which has this to say about the whole notion of variety:
“If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know there’s been a whole month dedicated to variety shows, a genre that peaked in the 1960s, and died a hard, ugly, unlamented death by the early 80s. Variety shows existed for one purpose–to prove that the star (or stars, if you were Donny and Marie Osmond) was multi-talented. They weren’t just actors, they were great singers! They could dance! They could do slapstick comedy! They could grimace their way through scripted banter with a guest star they never met until three minutes before taping began!
The trouble was, of course, that they couldn’t do all those things. Sometimes it was so apparent they couldn’t do all those things that it made watching the show an endurance test, a challenge to see how much secondhand embarrassment one could take before switching over to a soothing, more entertaining test pattern. Mary Tyler Moore actually comes pretty close, but it still doesn’t save 1978’s Mary, which lasted a regrettable three episodes, from the stink of desperation.”
Which I think might be one of the most cynical things I’ve ever read. I do understand that it’s an over-exaggeration to make the point; I’m just not sure I agree with the point. I’m not being deliberately difficult, but I think the point of variety was to entertain people, wasn’t it? Which it managed, for decades. But there is something here about the way television was heading, for good or for ill.
Let’s take a look at one example in particular. Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night (Harper, 2017) by Jason Zinoman, has some material about Letterman’s appearances in Mary, including a routine dissecting a magic trick which I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else. But the anecdote about his guest appearance on Mork & Mindy is, if anything, even more interesting:
“If Mary taught him that he couldn’t sing or dance, his cameo role on Mork & Mindy was a lesson in the dangers of acting. Letterman was cast as an obnoxious motivational speaker who kept telling his followers to sit down and shut up, and bragged about his Rolls-Royce. The casting agent probably thought that Letterman’s stage persona would make him a natural for this superior jerk. But in a villain role that required him to commit, he looked as uncomfortable as he did in a chorus line.
In an era of entertainers who did a little bit of everything—singing, dancing, and a few jokes — Letterman was a specialist. And while his early experiences were failures, they helped him understand his limitations. Wil Shriner, a fellow stand-up comic and friend, recalled how miserable he was on the drive to the studio to shoot Mork & Mindy. On the way home, Letterman said, ‘I will never do that again.’”
This was the episode “Mork Goes Erk”, broadcast on ABC on the 8th February 1979. Letterman is only in one scene, half of which I’ve embedded below.1
To be honest, I don’t think Letterman looks uncomfortable in the episode at all. He’s a better actor than a dancer. The problem with his character is more at script level; he’s just immediately skeevy, rather than slowly revealing himself to be so. That ain’t Letterman’s fault. Still, I will trust that he didn’t enjoy himself; there is, of course, the inevitable Letterman clip covering this.
But this idea of Letterman being a “specialist” is interesting. And while I don’t agree with Gena of Tune in Tonight! about the merits or not of variety, it does seem to be that there has been a general shift of view towards this: that people should, in essence, stick to their lane and do the things they’re good at.
I’m not keen on that. Of course Letterman was a fantastic chat show host. But I wish he’d been able to truly let go and have fun doing the occasional guest role, like in Mork & Mindy. I enjoy seeing people I like do different things. This is exactly what variety excels at.
If you squint, there are still a few things like this around today. It’s the whole point of The Masked Singer, after all. And it’s no surprise that Masked Singer is one my favourite current shows, being one of the most variety-adjacent things currently in production. But the direction of travel towards specialism is obvious.
* * *
Considering that Mary Tyler Moore was starring in a song and dance show, it’s fair to say that plenty of people did not think her singing and dancing was up to scratch. The below is a sample of comments which focus specifically on this, both good, bad, and indifferent:
“Mary gets to sing and dance, which is okay, but her big asset remains her personality.”
— Joan Hanauer, Sentinal Tribune, 22nd September 1978
“Her hoofing with “The Ed Asner Dancers” is truly a sight to behold…”
— Jay Sharbutt, Associated Press, 22nd September 1978
“…Mary’s dancing talents, despite all those lessons, fall somewhere between those of a UCLA cheerleader and Debbie Reynolds and her singing is something that can only be used as an excuse for a personal putdown, one of the basic weapons in Mary’s bag of tricks.”
— Donn Downey, The Globe and Mail, 23rd September 1978
“Ms. Moore has always seen herself as a singer and a dancer. Her previous specials have created a big yawn with critics and audiences. On her first new show she does a dance routine with “The Ed Asner Dancers.” These are all Ed Asner-Lou Grant lookalikes. She sings “We’ve Only Just Begun.” At both she is just adequate.”
— Hugh Gallagher, Albuquerque Journal, 24th September 1978
“She dances acceptably and has a pleasant singing voice and personality.”
— David Bittan, Trenton Times, 29th September 1978
“She seems to lack the self-knowledge to realize she isn’t a song-and-dance lady.”
— Frank Swertlow, Chicago Sun Times, 29th September 1978
“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.”
— Bob Talbert, Detroit Free Press, 6th October 1978
“…she’s a terrific talent, but she’s not a great singer or dancer.”
— Jay Tarses, Emmy Magazine, Spring 1981
It is worth pointing out on that last one that Jay Tarses was, erm, one of the producers of Mary. My battle with the critics of Mary has now reached quite literally the final boss. Leave me alone, I don’t agree with Doug Naylor about Red Dwarf either.
I personally think Mary Tyler Moore could both dance and sing, had shown she could for years, and some of the comments above are ludicrously unfair. Time and time again she impressed me with this on The Dick Van Dyke Show, a programme which broke out in singing and dancing and the like so much that it often seemed as much a variety show as a sitcom. “The Secret Life of Buddy and Sally”, broadcast on CBS on the 28th November 1962, is as good an example as any:
I have a great deal of fun with her and the “Zodiac Dancers” in How to Survive the 70s, broadcast on the 22nd February 1978, just a few months before Mary:
Some of these comments about Mary feel like being very keen to tell a successful woman to stay in her lane. Others are no doubt made in better faith. But all of them seem to be trying to judge slightly the wrong thing about Mary’s performances in her variety shows.
Could Mary sing and dance? I think: undoubtedly. Was she the best technical singer and dancer in the world? No. But crucially, I think she was good enough. To work correctly within a variety series, being the best technical singer and dancer not only isn’t required, but isn’t even the correct skillset. The thing you need is for an audience to love you, and to be able to do many different things.
And that, Mary Tyler Moore had in spades. Perhaps people really had already started to decide that’s not what they wanted any more. In which case, maybe it was the very beginning of television looking at the kind of thing I enjoy… and going “nah, sorry”.
If you want the other half, buy the DVD. You can get every single episode for under £30 now. ↩