I like to imagine myself walking down the city streets in a wool coat, coloured tights, and a fashionable hat while the voice of Sonny Curtis assures me that I am indeed a force to be reckoned with. In reality the wool coat is not nearly warm enough for Toronto winters, I’ll have to pull my tights up every five minutes, and I’ll inevitably be a victim of horrible hat hair- but hey a girl can dream.
It would be easy to see Mary Richards as simply this unattainable ideal for women- the only girl in the world that was worthy of that catchy theme song- but Mary Tyler Moore played her with a sense of and humility that made her so very human. Sure we all wanted to be her, but we also wanted to be her best friend. And she felt like it.
In my junior year of high school we were assigned a nonfiction book report and instead of a 500 page Roosevelt biography I opted for Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, an account for the history of the Mary Tyler Moore Show by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. It was a show I had occasionally watched reruns of, a show my mother and my aunts had grown up watching, a show that inspired the women who created the TV that I loved. At the time it almost seemed silly that as my classmates were studying the history world wars and scientific developments I was studying a television show, but it was a television more important than I could have realized.
At the time the premise of a single woman leading her own TV show was practically unheard of. Sure Lucy got her moment in the spotlight, but she needed Ricky to keep her intact. Originally the show was pitched as a divorced woman moving to Minneapolis to start over, CBS found this to be a bit “risqué” so they compromised with the creative team by deciding that she had been “living in sin” and eventually left the relationship. There she interviews with Lou Grant at the local news station WJM where he declares- “you’ve got spunk. I hate spunk!” but offers her the position of associate producer. She tosses her hat in the air and gets to work- becoming a lasting symbol of the modern woman.
Although I’m not an expert on the series it’s hard not to recognize it as a landmark of TV. Not just in terms of its heroine, but in the workplace that was created, the relationships that were developed, the punch lines that were delivered. When I heard of Moore’s passing I started revisiting highlights of the series and besides noting how much of my personal fashion is modeled after thirty-something women in the 70s, I marveled at the quiet feminism of the show. Mary Richards wasn’t burning her bra or lobbying congressmen, but she was doing her job and doing it really well. She established herself in a male work environment by standing her ground when necessary and admitting she was wrong if need be. She and her upstairs neighbour Rhoda were a progressive example of a female friendship who confided to each other about work and relationships and sex. They joked about birth control and referenced one-night stands. They were funny, quirky, intelligent and fiercely independent.
TV has followed the shadow cast by Moore with many different iterations of the single gal making her way in the world. Nearly every one of them ends up with some wide-eyed suitor in the eleventh hour. After the show’s seven-year run Richards ends up single- but happy and fulfilled. A feat revolutionary even by today’s standards. Perhaps it wasn’t the history of world wars or the history of scientific developments- but it was history, after all.