Mason Adams was the voice of a LOT of commercials (possibly including Smuckers – I don’t recall) well before Lou Grant aired. When he appeared on the first episode I immediately realized that his was the face that went with the voice-overs in all those commercials.
I remember that episode too. Rossi went undercover to do some investigative reporting and got the crap beaten out of him when he was exposed. He was all bandaged up when he was writing the story back in the office.
Does anyone remember this: In one episode of The White Shadow (another CBS show) the eponymous character was watching TV on his porch, and you could hear the theme music to Lou Grant coming from the TV?
Interesting bit of cross-promotion, but when ESPN Classic was running TWS a while back, I never saw that scene. Did it really happen?
One of the reporters was a cheery type played by Jack Bannon, Bea ‘Kate Bradley’ Benaderet’s real life son. Another was played by a dour Robert Walden. [Just looked up, and the character names were Art Donovan and Joe Rossi, respectively.]
In one ep, Lou is about to send him out to do some kind of human interest, light-hearted story. Not the exact exchange, but something like it:
Bannon: Are you sure you want to send Rossi out on this story? He’s not exactly Art Buchwald.
Grant: He’s not even Earl Butz, but he’s all we got.
I took that to mean, “He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor,” to which Grant responds, “I know. . . He doesn’t even have a funny name.”
It was a very lived-in face.
Here’s the intro:
Not quite, though Butz did of course have a funny name.
Butz was Secretary of Agriculture in the mid-seventies, but he lost his position (“resigned”) after telling a couple of very offensive “jokes,” including one considered so vulgar that hardly any papers of the day would print it.
At the time the show was on, Butz’s rather ruinous attempts at comedy would obviously have been much better remembered than they are today.
Anyway, that’s the reference.
MTM shows would often cross-promote their shows, most notably on St. Elsewhere
• Actor Byron Stewart who played student/basketball player Warren Coolidge on The White Shadow played Warren Coolidge, now an orderly, on St. E. Fellow White Shadow cast member, Actor Timothy Van Patten guest starred as a patient named Dean on three episodes. On one of those episodes, as Dean enters an elevator, Warren sees him and shouts out “Hey Salami!” Salami was Van Patten’s character’s name on White Shadow.
• Jack Riley, who played patient Elliot Carlin on The Bob Newhart Show played patient…Elliot Carlin on a few episodes of St. Elsewhere. He’d often mention a “quack” doctor who treated him in Chicago.
• Actor Oliver Clark played a patient who had amnesia, he was called John Doe, over a series of episodes on St. Elsewhere, on one of those episodes thought he was Mary Richards (even spinning around and throwing his knit hat in the air, ala MTM.) which led to some funny moments when he met a visiting navel captain, played by Betty White, and kept calling her Sue Ann (of course, referring to her Sue Ann Nivens character from The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
I’m sure there are more MTM crossovers from St. Elsewhere that I’ve forgotten,
It’s weird. I remember the character “Lou Grant” on the Mary Tyler Moore show. I remember watching and enjoying the show “Lou Grant.” but I can’t recall a single episode of either.
Somewhat off topic, but for anyone who’s interested in the story about Butz and the NSFW “joke” (I wouldn’t even call it a joke) is at this link: [spoiler]The infamous quote that revealed Earl was a bigoted Butz-hole… - This Day in Quotes.
Her belly button was out? 
Around the middle of the third season, I noticed St Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues (another MTM show) had started borrowing plot lines from each other. For example: One week, there’d be a male stripper at the police station; a couple of weeks later, he’d be in the ER (“I got the idea from some cop show!”).
There was an episode on “Mary Tyler Moore” where Lou Grant turned 50 “Just think of it. Two thirds of your life is over” is how Ted Baxter consoled Lou). Asner must have been “born old”…a decade earlier he was on a few episodes of “The Untouchables” were he seemed middle aged even then. At the same time it seemed risky to cast Moore as Dick van Dyke’s wife when he was about a decade older.
This thread roused my curiousity to see how well the show held up after all of these years. I had the afternoon free, so I binge watched it for three hours. It held up well. 
Watching it during its first run, I wanted a buddy like Animal and had a huge crush on Rossi.
Update: Lou Grant season 5 has just been released on DVD–in the past week actually. I bought it today, from the local video store. (I should state that it is more of a pop-culture store: it stocks DVDs, Blu-Rays, coffee mugs with the Batman logo, Superman blankets, music CDs, Spider-Man cookie jars, and so on and so on. I just think of it as a video store.)
The young lady (no older than 25) working at the video store checkout remarked, “I’ve never heard of this show.” We talked a bit, and she finally recognized the character from the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which she had seen. I explained how Lou made the jump from a half-hour sitcom to an hour-long drama, and she was curious. Maybe I made a convert.
Right now, I’m binging on Lou Grant, season 5. It’s great!
Just checked Netflix, it ain’t there. Bummer.
mmm
I,m going to check out the local used video store. Maybe they have it. It’s where I got all five seasons of Babylon 5.
That’s an awesome intro.
And it makes me a little sad about the absence of a daily newspaper in my life.
mmm
He played a Communist sleeper agent in an early Jim Phelps episode of Mission: Impossible (the one with Steve “Lord Garth” Inhat and Jason “Rael” Evers). He was completely believable as someone who’d been living a lie for years and was thoroughly burned out and ready to go home. (Of course he didn’t, at least not right away. The IMF tripped him up.)
First thing I remember about Lou Grant was getting used to seeing Mason Adams’ face. Before that, I listened to a whole lot of CBS Radio Mystery Theater, on which it seemed like he was in almost every episode.
There was the Cheers! crossover where Dr.s Auschlander and Westphal showed up at the bar. Was Cheers! an MTM production?
No, but they were both on NBC.