New Article: “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” vs. “The Apprentice”: Community and Compassion as American Ideals
David Shasha
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” vs. “The Apprentice”: Community and Compassion as American Ideals
The historical lineage of the groundbreaking Feminist situation-comedy “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” actually begins with the equally groundbreaking Live TV sketch comedy show “Your Show of Shows” (1950-1954), which starred the legendary Sid Caesar, featured the brilliant supporting players Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, and Louis Nye, and boasted a writing staff that included future cultural icons like Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Larry Gelbart.
Here is The New York Times obituary for Caesar from 2014:
Central to Caesar’s success was the participation of the aforementioned Carl Reiner, who would use his “Show of Shows” experience to create the iconic “Dick Van Dyke Show” which featured Mary Tyler Moore as the wife of lead character Rob Petrie.
Reiner made Petrie head writer for the show’s fictional “Alan Brady Show” whose title character, played by Reiner himself, was loosely based on Caesar. A good deal of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” took place in the writers’ room where the legendary “Show of Shows” team was sharply reduced to the characters played by Van Dyke, Morey Amsterdam, and Rose Marie.
“The Dick Van Dyke Show” did something very interesting to the “Show of Shows” source: It made the Petries Gentile rather than Jewish, and turned the pressure-cooker world of Manhattan in the Golden Age of Television into a very bland Suburban milieu.
When we think of what Reiner was doing, it is not hard to recall what happened to Gertrude Berg and her “Goldbergs” TV show:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldbergs_(broadcast_series)#Television
From the show’s debut on television in 1949 until 1954 the very Jewish family lived in their Bronx tenement, but in 1955 the network decided to move them out to the Suburbs.
While “The Goldbergs” remained Jewish, but were forced into the Gentile neighborhood, Reiner, himself a Jew, made the Petries non-Jews.
“The Dick Van Dyke Show” thus represented a sharp neutralization of the Jewish element, and it was this that gave the very Shiksa Mary Tyler Moore her first starring role on television.
The show aired from 1961 to 1966:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dick_Van_Dyke_Show
Reiner helped to usher in a new era of bland characters on network television rooted in 1950s mores. We saw the process transform great Hollywood actors like Fred MacMurray, William Demarest, Edgar Buchanan, Eddie Albert, Donna Reed, Raymond Burr, Loretta Young, Agnes Moorehead, and so many others into caricature stick figures without any real dramatic or comedic edge.
Growing up in the 1960s many of us had no idea that these cartoonish figures were actually once serious movie actors who presented a very different dramatic approach to their art than what we were seeing on our TV screens.
Ms. Moore’s Laura Petrie was the average American housewife living in Suburbia, dutifully obeying her breadwinner husband, and mindlessly acting cute as a button.
So when CBS broadcast the first episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in 1970, just a few years after “The Dick Van Dyke Show” ended, it came as something of a shock to an audience raised on Laura Petrie and her smart outfits, bake sales, carpools, and subservience to Patriarchy.
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was created by the brilliant team of James L. Brooks and Alan Burns with creative input from brilliant writers like David Lloyd and Ed Weinberger:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mary_Tyler_Moore_Show
We are all by now aware of how important the show was in the development of the Feminist movement, as it presented to the mass American audience a single woman on her own, dealing with the many challenges of life without a husband or children.
As I was watching a marathon of the series presented on the Sundance channel soon after Moore’s passing, I began to notice another element of the show that is not being discussed in tributes to the actress: The theme of community and compassion as key American ideals.
It is clear that Mary Richards is a bold and daring individual whose attitude was never before seen on television quite so dramatically. While Marlo Thomas pioneered the single woman sit-com on “That Girl,” that show was full of whimsy and fluff that never penetrated the many complexities of the issues.
But for all the Feminist innovations presented in the Mary Richards character, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” also remains an exercise in the power of compassion rooted in human communities.
The show was centered in the tiny WJM newsroom in Minneapolis where we met an array of average people who bond together in a way that marks the true love that human beings can have for each other.
The iconic newsroom characters Lou Grant, Ted Baxter, Murray Slaughter, and Sue Ann Nivens were joined by Mary’s neighbors Rhoda Morgenstern and Phyllis Lindstrom; all of them inhabiting a fully-developed human eco-system where assistance and loyalty were highly-prized values.
For those who may never have seen the show, it is currently being broadcast on Friday mornings on the Sundance channel:
http://www.sundance.tv/films/the-mary-tyler-moore-show
“The Mary Tyler Moore” show coincided with the closing years of the tumultuous 1960s with its Anti-War protests, Civil Rights agitation, and Countercultural fury against the Nixon White House, leading to investigation of the Watergate debacle and the president’s resignation. It was a difficult period in American history that eventually led to a more reflective period which diligently sought to empower minority groups and previously excluded voices.
Indeed, Mary Tyler Moore’s career trajectory perfectly embodied the dramatic changes of the period. Her move from Laura Petrie to Mary Richards mirrored the changes that we were witnessing in the larger culture.
But we also saw the transformation of our political system as Nixon’s resignation after Watergate turned into the Carter presidency and its malaise, which led to the election of former Warner Bros. contract actor Ronald Reagan who made a name for himself when he shifted his political allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Radical Right of Barry Goldwater. Reagan’s fame rose after he declared war on the Hippies while Governor of California.
So when we think of Donald Trump we should remember that he is not the first actor to take over the Oval Office.
Reagan was also vilified as ignorant and malevolent when he took office, as the following Salon article explains:
A recent post on Barack Obama’s legacy from Vox shows us how we are still living in Reagan’s America:
http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/19/14323552/obama-legacy-reagan-clinton-conservative-liberal
The following post from Melville House discusses a number of the issues dealing with Reagan’s difficulty with the printed word in ways that echo the situation of the current president:
https://www.mhpbooks.com/reagan-hated-reading-maybe/
We should keep Reagan’s benighted Conservatism and Anti-Intellectualism in mind while reading the following column from the delusional David Brooks which seeks to defend his hero against the Trump insurgency:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/the-politics-of-cowardice.html?_r=0
It is important to realize that Reagan sought to turn back the clock on the Feminist movement, as well as on Civil Rights for minorities. His view of “Trickle-Down” economics and endless tax cuts has become Republican Party dogma that can now be seen as central to Trumpworld.
Reagan could also count Right Wing extremists Phyllis Schafly and Jerry Falwell as close allies.
As we ponder the cultural significance of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” it is critical to put it into the context of the Reagan years that followed.
The 1980s, as famously argued in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” was the decade of corrosive greed and the social barbarity it produced.
Reagan’s America was not at all the WJM newsroom and the close-knit community values which it represented in an America reeling from war and political scandal. Reagan appropriated the worn-out “Cowboy” mythology of an America that never existed, apparently never having seen John Ford/John Wayne movies like “Fort Apache” and “The Searchers” which put that myth under serious scrutiny.
The Reaganite mythos can be seen as the legitimate precursor of Trumpworld Fascism.
In this regard we can read Trump’s Reality TV idiocy “The Apprentice” as a manifestation of the Reaganite myth of “Bootstraps Capitalism,” which in fact has little to do with merit and achievement, and more to do with cruelty, bullying, and ignorance; traits that we can tie to Trump as well.
“The Apprentice” affirmed the detritus of Reaganite culture and its disdain for Democratic values, as it embraced Autocracy and Cruel Capitalism. Indeed, the whole fictional nature of the enterprise helps to account for the difficulty that Trump has with discerning illusion from reality. There is now the sense that he is running the Executive branch of our government as if it was a TV show.
This difficulty is another thing that links Trump to Reagan, who also had issues with truth and fiction because of his past life as a Hollywood actor.
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” spoke to American Liberal values and optimism, soon crushed by Reagan and his reactionary Moral Majority hordes. It believed that we would be able to successfully reconstruct the Post-Vietnam and Post-Watergate society in a way that would not erase or damage the many positive advances made in the 1960s.
Mary Tyler Moore’s Feminism has largely become standard in Corporate America. It is settled law that women are free to make their own choices as to family and profession without the interference of Patriarchy. No one seriously questions such things anymore. We can see women like Ivanka Trump playing a central role in the new presidential administration.
But the second aspect of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” the compassionate community, has been destroyed under the weight of the Reagan Revolution, and is in very rare supply in many of the cultural staples of today’s American Idiocracy.
Donald Trump came to national notoriety, likely helping him to win the presidency, because of two words: “You’re fired!” His crassness and bullying took a page out of the Reagan playbook, in spite of what David Brooks would like us to think, and supplanted Mary Richards’ hard-fought optimism predicated upon humanity and compassion with boorishness and barbarity.
The women of Trumpworld might be “liberated,” but they do not exhibit any of the liberal traits as they relate to community and humanity. Just take a look at the bizarre Kellyanne Conway show and its many ethical contortions. Cruelty and bullying are still the order of the day in the new White House.
So when we remember Mary Tyler Moore, we should think of the transformations of our culture: From the Golden Age of Television represented by Sid Caesar and his brilliant “Your Show of Shows” comedic collaborators, to the bland age of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and its Suburban idylls, to the Feminist shock of Mary Richards, which in turn engendered the benighted era of Reagan that now acts as a propaedeutic to Trumpworld Fascism.
Mary Richards sought help and support from her friends, and in turn provided them with her loyalty, resources, and heady optimism. The world of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was the exact inverse of “The Apprentice” where the idea is to beat down others in order to build ourselves up. Democracy is replaced by Autocracy.
Rather than working together as Americans, “The Apprentice” is all about looking out for the singular individual and leaving the other guy behind, even kicking him or her in the gut.
As we review the Trump inaugural speech which promised much to Americans, we should think of how cultural representations function in our current human eco-system. Trump’s cabinet picks have all been drawn from Wall Street and the most debased parts of our political system that show no indication of support for American democratic values and the need for compassion and community that has made our country great.
All that we have is the horror of the Trump “Apprentice” mantra “You’re fired!” which now serves as a leitmotif for his presidency.
Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Trump: When we compare and contrast these two iconic American figures we can better understand the genius as well as the dark downside of what we are as a culture.
The Trump ascendance makes the passing of Moore that much harder to swallow as we evolve from compassionate democratic values to the barbarity of Right Wing Fascism.
David Shasha