My recent four-part analysis of Mary was one of the hardest things I’ve ever written for Dirty Feed. When I’m writing stupid shit about The Young Ones, I have a base level of knowledge about the show in my head. With Mary, I was writing virtually from scratch, and that’s before you even get into disentangling fact and fiction surrounding the show.

But truth be told, I could have easily written ten articles about poor, maligned Mary. There’s simply so much to say about it, and a huge amount of contemporary newspaper reporting. I wrote a version of the first article which was almost twice as long, with twice as many review quotes. But I did want at least some readers to get to the end of the article without giving up.

Which means there’s shitloads of stuff I left out of those pieces. So let’s take one more trip back to the blog Tune in Tonight!, which has this to say about the whole notion of variety:

“If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know there’s been a whole month dedicated to variety shows, a genre that peaked in the 1960s, and died a hard, ugly, unlamented death by the early 80s. Variety shows existed for one purpose–to prove that the star (or stars, if you were Donny and Marie Osmond) was multi-talented. They weren’t just actors, they were great singers! They could dance! They could do slapstick comedy! They could grimace their way through scripted banter with a guest star they never met until three minutes before taping began!

The trouble was, of course, that they couldn’t do all those things. Sometimes it was so apparent they couldn’t do all those things that it made watching the show an endurance test, a challenge to see how much secondhand embarrassment one could take before switching over to a soothing, more entertaining test pattern. Mary Tyler Moore actually comes pretty close, but it still doesn’t save 1978’s Mary, which lasted a regrettable three episodes, from the stink of desperation.”

Which I think might be one of the most cynical things I’ve ever read. I do understand that it’s an over-exaggeration to make the point; I’m just not sure I agree with the point. I’m not being deliberately difficult, but I think the point of variety was to entertain people, wasn’t it? Which it managed, for decades. But there is something here about the way television was heading, for good or for ill.

Let’s take a look at one example in particular. Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night (Harper, 2017) by Jason Zinoman, has some material about Letterman’s appearances in Mary, including a routine dissecting a magic trick which I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else. But the anecdote about his guest appearance on Mork & Mindy is, if anything, even more interesting:

“If Mary taught him that he couldn’t sing or dance, his cameo role on Mork & Mindy was a lesson in the dangers of acting. Letterman was cast as an obnoxious motivational speaker who kept telling his followers to sit down and shut up, and bragged about his Rolls-Royce. The casting agent probably thought that Letterman’s stage persona would make him a natural for this superior jerk. But in a villain role that required him to commit, he looked as uncomfortable as he did in a chorus line.

In an era of entertainers who did a little bit of everything—singing, dancing, and a few jokes — Letterman was a specialist. And while his early experiences were failures, they helped him understand his limitations. Wil Shriner, a fellow stand-up comic and friend, recalled how miserable he was on the drive to the studio to shoot Mork & Mindy. On the way home, Letterman said, ‘I will never do that again.’”

This was the episode “Mork Goes Erk”, broadcast on ABC on the 8th February 1979. Letterman is only in one scene, half of which I’ve embedded below.¹

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1. If you want the other half, buy the DVD. You can get every single episode for under £30 now. ↩

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Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

Last time, I asked a simple question: Why is it that Mary attracts so much negative comment today, with people falling over themselves to slag it off, when I’ve rather enjoyed what I’ve seen of it so far? Do I simply have terrible taste in television?

That is a distinct possibility. But I also think there’s a few deeper things going on here.

Vince Keenan, in this piece about Mary, makes a very good point about modern attitudes towards the show. He correctly notes that recent documentary Being Mary Tyler Moore does not cover Mary.. and also that it was far from a surprise that it goes absolutely nowhere near it. Why?

“…because the Mary/The Mary Tyler Moore Hour debacle is perceived not only as a failure, but the wrong kind of failure. One seen as a dead end. But every show business narrative needs the right kind of failure, an early misstep that opens doors and creates second acts.”

He goes on to suggest that the “right” kind of failure with Mary Tyler Moore was her disastrous 1966 stage musical Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and her subsequent middling films, which ended up leading to her renaissance on television. I think Vince is exactly right that this is why Being Mary Tyler Moore didn’t cover Mary: because it essentially lead to nothing, at least when it came to Mary herself.

But I think we can take this a step further. Because Mary is the “wrong” kind of failure, it also means that people find the show difficult to judge on its own merits. Something that was pulled after three weeks because it didn’t get the ratings is just “obviously” a poor show. The juggernaut of received opinion rolls on, the narrative takes over, and before you know it, nobody’s really analysing the show properly, they’re just trading insults about it.

Vince himself doesn’t seem immune to this: in a paragraph explaining why he thinks the show is bad, he simply states “Moore opens with Loudon Wainwright III’s ‘Dead Skunk.'”¹ As though this is a self-evidently terrible thing, with no justification needed. Now I personally think the segment is hilarious, but that’s a judgement call; what I find interesting is that multiple people who have looked back at Mary just don’t seem to understand the gag. For the avoidance of doubt: America’s Sweetheart™ opened a show by singing about a dead skunk, instead of about something nice. The inappropriateness was the joke.

All this already seems to have put up a barrier when it comes to how to interpreting Mary. But it’s compounded by something else: numerous people who worked on the show have often had negative things to say about it. Vince quotes Swoozie Kurtz calling Mary’s dancing “bossa-nova-meets-yeast-infection”, which is extremely amusing, albeit unfair. But the most obvious and famous criticism comes from Michael Keaton and David Letterman, and particularly with Letterman’s agony at doing the dance numbers.

Vince goes on to mention the following segment from Letterman which aired on the 28th April 2015, featuring Keaton as guest.

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1. Vince doesn’t identify this show as unaired, but he does correctly state that it’s an incomplete edit, which is more than many people bother to do. ↩

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