Paula Bernstein - Love Is All Around

You can have the townwhy dont you take it?

THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW THEME SONG

I n one of the most memorable TV openings of all timeset to Sonny Curtiss infectious theme song, Love Is All Arounda fresh-faced Mary Tyler Moore, a.k.a. Mary Richards, is behind the wheel of a 1970 Ford Mustang driving toward Minneapolis and a fresh start. Shes off on a new adventure, and were right there rooting for her. Fifty years ago, Mary Richards set out to make it on her own, and television has never been the same.

Who can forget the iconic hat toss moment at the end of the opening credits? Our plucky heroine runs into the middle of a busy intersection in downtown Minneapolis, stops, spins around, and tosses her knitted black-and-turquoise beretsome call it a tam-o-shanterup in the air without a care in the world. A freeze-frame captures her beaming face. The beret is forever frozen in midair. When Mary tosses her hat up in the air, shes throwing caution (or at least her hat) to the wind. Shes made it this far; shes going all the way! Shes taking chances, taking control of her life. Shes graduating into the world as an independent woman, and her exuberance is infectious. As the seasons rolled by, the credits evolved, but Mary was always Mary. Her hopeful spirit and joie de vivre still serve as examples of how to get by in this crazy world without getting down.

With its smart writing and its flawed but lovable characters, The Mary Tyler Moore Show broke ground for its portrayal of a single career woman trying to make it on her own. It is an undeniable classicbut even classics dont start out that way. Back in 1969, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was not much more than a name and a leading lady. Mary Tyler Moore, the comedic actress who had won an Emmy for playing the enchanting suburban housewife Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show just a few years earlier, had signed a deal with CBS to star in a sitcom. CBS had given Moore and her husband at the time, TV executive Grant Tinker, a thirteen-episode commitment, which meant there would be no pilot episode. This was jumping into the deep end of the pool before learning how to swim.

Even if youre a star of Mary Tyler Moores caliber, that kind of opportunity only comes around once. Her attempts at stage and screen success had faltered, so she was hoping for another TV hit. This time it would be her name in the title rather than Dick Van Dykes. Moore and Tinker got to work right away, creating their own production company, MTM Enterprises, and hiring TV writers James L. Brooks and Allan Burns. Brooks was the creator of the groundbreaking TV series Room 222, about a racially diverse high school history class; Burns had written a number of episodes for the Emmy Awardwinning show. They were both looking to work on another innovative seriessomething a little edgier than most of the plain vanilla fare on TV at the time. Wholesome, rural-skewing hits like CBSs Gunsmoke and Mayberry R.F.D. were too predictable and homespun and seemed dated in the quickly changing world of the late 60s. The writers wanted to create a show that would reflect the complicated world around themand the changing roles for women in society. Brooks and Burns had a leading lady, a title, and a deal with CBS. Now they just needed to come up with a fresh concept.

It was Moores name in the title, but she didnt want the show to rest entirely on her shoulders. It would be an ensemble piece, and her character wouldnt be too much of a stretch from her real personality. She couldnt be married on the new show, because that would remind people of Laura Petrie. Maybe, they thought, she could have a job, like an assistant to a newspaper gossip columnist. Nah, shed work at a TV station. Either way, the writers decided that, like The Dick Van Dyke Show before it, The Mary Tyler Moore Show would be divided between two main sphereshome and work. In their initial concept, Mary Tyler Moore would play Mary Richards, a thirty-year-old woman from small-town Minnesota who moves to Minneapolis following a divorce to make it on her own. Brooks described The Dick Van Dyke Show as people that you really liked, saying funny things frequently. The Mary Tyler Moore Show would aspire to do the same.

The creators had decided early on to set the show somewhere outside of New York or Los Angeles or Chicago, the typical settings for TV shows at the time. The idea of Minnesota came up after the writers were talking about the Minnesota Vikings. Minneapolis would work. The citys chilly weather would make for good plotlinesand would provide a handy excuse to film predominantly indoors (aside from some establishing exterior shots, the show was actually shot in front of a live studio audience in Hollywood, California). For Mary Richards, who came from small-town Minnesota, Minneapolis was the big city, which says a lot about how her character was envisioned. She was eager for adventure but wasnt going to pack up her VW Bug and drive to San Francisco.

Rather than churn out a predictable sitcom featuring yet another dutiful housewife character, writers Brooks and Burns took a chance by making the central character of Mary Richards a single career woman in her thirties. That was a bold idea at the time, given that women were just beginning to enter the workforce and there had never been a prime-time TV series centered around a single career woman. (Julia, which aired from 1968 to 1971, featured Diahann Carroll as a nurse and single mother, but she was a widow.) This was before Murphy Brown, Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, Girls, 30 Rock, and all the shows featuring single career women who followed in Marys footsteps.

That was all fine and good, but as soon as CBS heard the word divorce, they freaked. Wouldnt audiences assume Moore had divorced Dick Van Dyke? She and her former on-screen spouse had had such great chemistry that TV audiences sometimes assumed they were married in real life. Besides, the CBS executives said, their research department had shared a list of taboo subjects that audiences supposedly wouldnt accept on TV, including divorce. Allan Burns later recalled: We sat there in a room full of divorced New York Jews with mustaches and heard them say there are four things Americans dont like: New Yorkers, divorced people, men with mustaches, and Jews. It was strongly hinted that if we insisted on having Mary divorced, the show would go on at one in the morning.