Being older, I am slow to realize what the Internet offers. Yes, I've heard there's porn, but did you know you can watch all the episodes of "The Mary Tyler Moore" show on YouTube? Its run on CBS, from 1970 to 1977, coincided almost exactly with my teenaged years. I didn't know about it at first. As near as I can remember, the show crossed into my consciousness for the first time when a Sports Illustrated article about the suddenly competitive Gopher basketball team made a somewhat lame joke about how Minnesotans would even give up watching Mary Tyler Moore in order to go to the games on Saturday evenings. That was the 1971-72 basketball season. It wasn't long before SI ran another article about the team, "An Ugly Affair in Minneapolis," that made no mention of plucky, decent, lovable Mary.
So it was probably in its second or third season that I started watching MTM. The hook was just the knowledge that a popular network sit com was set in Minneapolis. This, I now understand, was almost accidental, as Minneapolis was settled on when one of the writers went on a long jag about the strengths and weaknesses of the Vikings football team. The show's creators, in other words, seem to have been quite indifferent about the geographic locale. If so, I think it was a happy accident that a Vikings fan was among the writers. The show doesn't make a point of developing the back stories of the various characters, but in Season 1 it does make plain that Moore's character, Mary Richards, is a native Minnesotan. She moves to Minneapolis from an unnamed smaller Minnesota town after breaking off an engagement. In one of the earliest episodes, the fellow tries to edge back into her life, and she is interested enough to meet him—whereupon she remembers what she didn't like. The purpose of this seems related to the original idea that Mary would be starting a new life after a divorce. But there was some fear that viewers would then be confused and think that Mary Richards, played by an actress most famous for having played Laura Petrie, had divorced Dick Van Dyke, and would dislike her for it! Thus the effort to establish that she's a native Minnesotan, never married.
She's also the smartest, most decent and psychologically fit character on the show, a foil to the often buffoonish men and oddly (considering their buffoonery) man-crazy women. That this "together" character is the only one who clearly hails from Minnesota plays into a popular mythology, unless it helped to create the myth that we denizens of the most frozen part of the Midwest are among the best specimens the country has to offer. The Coen brothers' Marge Gunderson is a younger cousin of Mary Richards, and I bet Garrison Keillor was a fan, too. I shouldn't say it, because it's what lawyers call a "statement against interest," but one uniting trait of these various women characters is that they are smarter and abler than the men in their lives, and undertake themselves to disguise this fact in order to keep everyone happy. It's wrong that they should feel they have to do it, but we'd be very thankful if only we were smart enough to notice what's going on.
Final note: it's an enjoyable fact that the show's fans connect Mary to the city of Minneapolis so intensely that the people who lived in "her house"—the one at 2104 Kenwood Parkway shown in the opening sequence—were beset by tourists and, to discourage picture taking and filming, though also I hope because it was the right thing to do, hung an IMPEACH NIXON sign below Mary's big upstairs window during the height of the show's popularity.
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