MARY TYLER MOORE, 7.a TEMPORADA (MTM, LAST SEASON, USA 1997) – I must tell that watching this last season actually moved
me inside. Definitely, I should say that MTM was one of the best shows on TV
ever. The show perfectly poised between the traditional mainstream culture reflected in
the television of the 1960s and the more farcical, cynical, sex-saturated
depictions of young and not-so-young narcissists we have, today. It depicted
the emerging paradox of American culture: growing freedom for women (and men)
to shape their own lives, accompanied by a new sense of limits and a loss of
optimism. In the show, Mary Tyler Moore plays Mary Richards, a well-integrated,
genuinely nice, non-narcissistic character who is stuck with a less than ideal
life, for a new, less optimistic, age. She works for a mediocre television
station and, despite the fact that she is the best catch in America, she can't
find a mate. The program also starred Ed Asner as Lou Grant, the outwardly hard-nosed
and gruff news editor who is inwardly a pussy cat. The late Ted Knight played
Ted Baxter, as the television anchor whose outward appearance as an airhead
conceals absolutely nothing underneath. He is self-worshipping, superficial and
has no idea of the meaning of many of the stories he relates on the air, all of
which makes him a good symbol for the popular culture that was developing in
America. Like Diana Christensen, played by Faye Dunaway, in the movie Network,
he is television. Betty White plays Sue Ann Nivens, the man-hungry gourmet with
a cooking program that is on the same network as the news show. She's Mary's
opposite -- conniving, cynical, sarcastic -- just as Lou and Ted represent
alternative forms of age and authority: image versus imagelessness, vacuousness
versus substance, narcissistic self-absorption versus (more or less) altruistic
adulthood. The newsroom, which is the main site of the action, along with
Mary's studio apartment, is a kind of trap of banality, made more livable by
the fact that Mary is able to bond with the men on her right and left, as if
they are her family. Lou is her surrogate father; and Murray Slaughter, the
news writer, her brother. Mundane Murray sits next to her, pounding out the
words, turning the great and small events of the day into copy that will be
butchered by Ted. If the newsroom is a family, then Ted is the idiot uncle and
the only one who seems to be in his element. Sue Ann Nivens is the neighbor
with an over-active social life. Mary Tyler Moore turned out to be the nexus
for, and force behind, some of the best stuff on television. She co-starred on The
Dick Van Dyke Show and, as noted, her MTM Enterprises was responsible for The
Mary Tyler Moore Show; Rhoda and The Bob Newhart Show. In
addition, it produced the program, Lou Grant, the finest drama ever
created for television, which depicts journalists who try to solve social
problems by telling the truth to the public. Above, you can watch the last show.
