Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four (Coming soon!)
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.
* * *
Back in 2017, the blog Tune in Tonight published a piece about Mary. It’s a piece which uses the video embedded at the top of this article as its main reference point. I have to be honest, I disagree with much of it – I could, for instance, put together a fair defence of the pushy date sketch as a very intentional piece of satire against awful men, rather than just bad jokes about date rape. But at least the article is trying to analyse specifics about the show, rather than just chucking around cliches.
Unfortunately, it also makes a bad mistake. Right at the end of the piece we are told:
Original airdate: September 24, 1978
Watch it here
And it quickly becomes clear that the writer has got confused about things entirely, and thinks that this video represents the first ever episode of Mary, and the first thing audiences in 1978 saw of the show. In reality, the only chance anybody outside the TV industry would have had a chance to see this material is if they, say, wrote for The Los Angeles Times.
Which means there’s a whole level of understanding regarding this material which Tune in Tonight is missing. As an example, it’s worth watching the striking sketch where Mary visits the WJM newsroom from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, from 2:04.2 Tune in Tonight has the following to say about it:
“Although one can assume that Moore was hoping audiences would see her as something other than Mary Richards, it’s not even three minutes into the episode before there’s a gag involving her returning to the old Mary Tyler Moore Show set, where extras are sitting covered in cobwebs, evidently awaiting her arrival. She looks around wistfully, and though it was likely unintentional, it puts a bummer edge on the show, as if she’s acknowledging that it’s a dud, and wants to be back in a familiar setting as much as her fans do.”
Here’s what I find fascinating about the sketch: the fact it wasn’t broadcast changes it significantly. It feels like it was intended to be a huge moment – a real talking point for the show. The fact that this attention-grabbing material never even made it to air in order to actually grab people’s attention is ten times more melancholy than anything Tune in Tonight identifies in the sketch itself.
As for the analysis regarding the end of the episode:
“The show closes with “whatever happened to” cards for each of the actors (even though the program would return the following week). In a gag that, even 24 hours after I watched it, I still don’t understand, Michael Keaton’s is left blank.”
Of course, the program didn’t return the following week. It didn’t even return “this week”. And as for why Michael Keaton’s still is left blank… I don’t think it’s a gag at all. I think this part of the show simply wasn’t quite completed, at least in the edit we have access to.
This is the problem when unfinished, unbroadcast TV shows are subjected to analysis by people who don’t understand how to interpret them. Special rules apply when dealing with programmes like this. Nothing about that video is how a real viewer experienced Mary back in 1978, and unless you understand this, it’s difficult to judge the show correctly or fairly.
* * *
The problem with Mary is that, wherever you turn, we run into problems similar to the above. And not just in YouTube videos, or in blog posts. In actual, professionally published books as well.
In the first part of this article, I mentioned that Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted (Simon & Schuster, 2013) has a brief and unflattering mention of Mary:
“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.'”
I have to say, I would very much like to see Michael Keaton and David Letterman sing “Macho Man”. Sadly, it’s not online. And more to the point: I can’t find a single mention of such a routine appearing on the show in contemporary newspaper previews and reviews of Mary. Hmmmmmm.
So where is it mentioned? Well, it’s a story which has been repeatedly told by Merrill Markoe, a woman whose ludicrously influential career in comedy over many years is going to get completely ignored by me, in favour of her work on… hey, guess which show?
In the book And Here’s the Kicker (F+W, 20093) by Mike Sacks, Merrill tells us the following:
“Dave and I worked on a 1978 CBS variety show called Mary starring Mary Tyler Moore and featuring Michael Keaton… it was cancelled after three or four episodes, even though 60 Minutes was the lead-in and Mary Tyler Moore was America’s Sweetheart. The show was an uncomfortable combination of old showbiz-style variety mixed with a miscalculated attempt to include some of that wacky, absurdist comic sensibility that the kids liked so much from that new program Saturday Night Live.
For example, the Mary show did a parody of the Village People song “Macho Man” that had Dave and Michael Keaton dressed in L.L. Bean-catalog outfits, in a setting that was made to look like a scene from Deliverance. I forget where the comedy was supposed to be in all this. I do know the powers-that-be didn’t realize that “Macho Man” was a gay anthem. I also remember vividly that Dave was in real agony about this bit of levity.”
Colour me suspicious as to where Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted was getting its information from.
There is one earlier reference to the sequence I can find… on a Mary Tyler Moore interview on Letterman, broadcast on the 6th February 1986.
MARY: I saw this man dressed as a pirate…
DAVID: A pirate, a rat…
MARY: Doing “Macho Man”… no, you refused to do Macho, Macho Man…
DAVID: No, no, no…
This opens up the interesting possibility that Letterman didn’t actually take part in the completed “Macho Man” segment, at odds to other tellings of the tale. I guess we’ll never know unless we ever get hold of a copy.
Either way, you can all tell where I’m going with this one. I can find no contemporary proof that “Macho Man” ever aired on Mary – all I can find is people who worked on the show reacting to it with varying degrees of horror. Eleven episodes of Mary were made: three aired, eight were unbroadcast, and only two of those eight are online in some form or another. I would be willing to bet a substantial amount of money that the “Macho Man” segment was in one of those six unbroadcast episodes we haven’t seen. None of the primary sources here suggest that the segment aired; simply that it was shot.
The problem with all this is that Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted claims the “Macho Man” routine was a “memorable number”. In fact, it’s the only segment from Mary which the book specifically mentions. To which I say: memorable to who? Memorable to people who worked on the show, of course. But not memorable to anybody else seemingly, because I can’t find anybody else who mentioned it at the time. Most people these days just seem to be copying what Merrill has to say.
That just isn’t a fair way to treat the show. A far better example to use would be the Ed Asner dancers from the first episode, which attracted widespread comment from a variety of commentators at the time, both positive and negative. But hey, let’s grab a sketch which probably never aired, and use it to poke poor Mary with yet again, shall we?
* * *
Which leaves us just one final question. Why is it that Mary attracts so much negative comment today, with people falling over themselves to slag it off, unfairly or otherwise?
I have a few ideas. Join me next time for the EXCITING CONCLUSION.
With thanks to Tanya Jones.
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. ↩
It really looks like the real set from The Mary Tyler Moore Show rather than a recreation, which means that the real set was hanging around in storage over a year after the show ended. Which is interesting in itself. ↩
First edition; it has since been re-released in an expanded form. ↩
