TV Comedy

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

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1. If you want the other half, buy the DVD. You can get every single episode for under £30 now. ↩

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Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

Last time, I asked a simple question: Why is it that Mary attracts so much negative comment today, with people falling over themselves to slag it off, when I’ve rather enjoyed what I’ve seen of it so far? Do I simply have terrible taste in television?

That is a distinct possibility. But I also think there’s a few deeper things going on here.

Vince Keenan, in this piece about Mary, makes a very good point about modern attitudes towards the show. He correctly notes that recent documentary Being Mary Tyler Moore does not cover Mary.. and also that it was far from a surprise that it goes absolutely nowhere near it. Why?

“…because the Mary/The Mary Tyler Moore Hour debacle is perceived not only as a failure, but the wrong kind of failure. One seen as a dead end. But every show business narrative needs the right kind of failure, an early misstep that opens doors and creates second acts.”

He goes on to suggest that the “right” kind of failure with Mary Tyler Moore was her disastrous 1966 stage musical Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and her subsequent middling films, which ended up leading to her renaissance on television. I think Vince is exactly right that this is why Being Mary Tyler Moore didn’t cover Mary: because it essentially lead to nothing, at least when it came to Mary herself.

But I think we can take this a step further. Because Mary is the “wrong” kind of failure, it also means that people find the show difficult to judge on its own merits. Something that was pulled after three weeks because it didn’t get the ratings is just “obviously” a poor show. The juggernaut of received opinion rolls on, the narrative takes over, and before you know it, nobody’s really analysing the show properly, they’re just trading insults about it.

Vince himself doesn’t seem immune to this: in a paragraph explaining why he thinks the show is bad, he simply states “Moore opens with Loudon Wainwright III’s ‘Dead Skunk.'”¹ As though this is a self-evidently terrible thing, with no justification needed. Now I personally think the segment is hilarious, but that’s a judgement call; what I find interesting is that multiple people who have looked back at Mary just don’t seem to understand the gag. For the avoidance of doubt: America’s Sweetheart™ opened a show by singing about a dead skunk, instead of about something nice. The inappropriateness was the joke.

All this already seems to have put up a barrier when it comes to how to interpreting Mary. But it’s compounded by something else: numerous people who worked on the show have often had negative things to say about it. Vince quotes Swoozie Kurtz calling Mary’s dancing “bossa-nova-meets-yeast-infection”, which is extremely amusing, albeit unfair. But the most obvious and famous criticism comes from Michael Keaton and David Letterman, and particularly with Letterman’s agony at doing the dance numbers.

Vince goes on to mention the following segment from Letterman which aired on the 28th April 2015, featuring Keaton as guest.

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1. Vince doesn’t identify this show as unaired, but he does correctly state that it’s an incomplete edit, which is more than many people bother to do. ↩

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Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

Previously, we talked about the history of Mary Tyler Moore’s 1978 variety series Mary, and analysed a half-finished episode hanging around online which was never transmitted. You would think that the story surrounding this show is already complicated enough, and it couldn’t get any more confusing.

Allow me to dissuade you of that notion.

There is one more video of material which originated from Mary on YouTube. This one is named “‘Mary’ Episode (unaired?) – 1978”. I won’t keep you in suspense; comparing the contents of this video with what was billed in contemporary newspapers, I can confirm that it was indeed unaired.¹

Unlike the previous unaired episode, this isn’t an unedited studio tape, but looks to be – mainly – completed. (I’ll be coming back to the “mainly” qualifier.) And more than that: unlike the other unaired material, we can actually come up with the date when this episode was supposed to have been broadcast: the 15th October 1978. A show which was supposed to air fourth in the run, and then was cancelled before transmission.

We don’t have to rely on guesswork when it comes to this. Plenty of contemporary newspaper coverage proves it beyond doubt. For instance, Cecil Smith reported the following in The Los Angeles Times on the 16th October:

“I wonder if CBS didn’t blow the whistle too early on “Mary,” which the network cancelled late last week. […] The show you didn’t see Sunday night was one of the brightest hours of the year. […]

I had dropped by the set of “Mary” to watch the show last month. At the time, they were working on their ninth show—they did 11. Unlike some of my colleagues, I was not too taken with the opening show on “Mary” — I thought it rather self-conscious and self-serving, despite the Ed Asner Dancers. They found another show for me to see – the Oct. 15 edition.

There were wonderful things in it. Mary revisited the set of the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, the newsroom of WJZ-TV in Minneapolis, where, as Mary Richards, she became a national institution. It seems the “atmosphere” – the extras who worked in the background while Mary, Lou, Murray and Ted occupied center stage – had never been told the series had ended. They were still at their desks, covered with cobwebs.

(“When I stepped on that set,” Mary told me later, “that was catch-in-the-throat time. There were tears.”)

In another marvellously funny sequence, she played Phyllis Marlowe, who had taken the place of her brother Philip, the private eye. The scene was choreographed hilariously to a narrator doing Raymond Chandler—it was beautiful parody down to the last elaborate metaphor.

And there was a number with Dick Shawn in which he languorously sang “Send in the Clowns” while a ballet of clowns came in and threw pies at him, tore his clothes off and generally did what clowns do.”

Yet again, this is an example of somebody who enjoyed Mary, despite most people treating it these days as something which was “obviously” terrible. And this is someone who hadn’t blindly loved the show – they disliked the first episode, and then were won round, albeit by (clearly flagged) unbroadcast material. I do realise I keep banging this drum, but it really is important to acknowledge that the way the show is usually talked about these days wasn’t a uniform opinion back in 1978, despite the poor audience figures.

Anyway, hopefully my main point is clear: every single sketch mentioned in Cecil Smith’s piece is in the video embedded at the top of this article. So case closed: this video really does contain the episode which was meant to air on the 15th October.

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1. The Saturday Night Fever sketch contained within was mentioned by Mary Tyler Moore in pre-show interviews, and also briefly featured in CBS fall promos. While I still maintain that when discussing the sketch as a whole you need to flag it as unbroadcast, you can put together a credible argument that Mary must have been pleased with how it turned out. ↩

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Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

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?

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