I’ve recently been digging around You Tube for footage from “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” a satirical soap opera that was a sensation in the mid70s. For example:
Mary’s neighbor drowns in chicken soup
Psychiatrists interrogate Mary and she breaks down
This must be the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen (I never saw the show in the original run). The 'luded out monotone of the lead character, the rambling conversations, the way tragic situations are handled so casually, the obsession with advertising–yet for about a year the show was popular to make the covers of Time and Rolling Stone. How did a show this unsettling ever become a major hit?
You had to be there.
No, seriously. It was a product of its time, and if you aren’t, then it will be difficult to understand. It was ground-breaking, in its way. But it aged poorly.
Sitcoms up until then were completely formulaic dreck and satire was really new and subversive. It was such a change to see something that hadn’t been done before. True, it was incredibly slow-moving, and it was really painful to watch Louise Lasser, but it was like gawking at an accident. You never knew what was going to happen that would defy expectations. When her neighbor drowned in the soup, I was stunned. In no other show would someone really die for laughs.
You just listed many of the fun elements of the show (in the OP)! Unsettling is a good thing, isn’t it? Isn’t the unsettling factor part of the reason people watch CSI or The Sopranos or The Kardashians?
I disagree that the show has aged poorly. That “psychiatrists interrogate Mary” clip would be fascinating & shocking in any era. Mary came out at a time when postmodern, media-aware entertainments were creeping into pop culture & in those terms it foreshadowed a lot of contemporary cable TV/internet culture. A show like “Late Night with David Letterman,” for example, owes a lot to Mary Hartman for propagating that sensibility. You can also trace the Mary Hartman sensibility forward to the comedies of Christopher Guest (actor Fred Willard being a living link between the two). So in a way, I think the show was a harbinger of a lot of comedy to come… and yet it’s still a weird show, perhaps made more unsettling by the fact that the acting in it is remarkably good.
Yeah, I thought the “unsettling” aspect of the show was part of its appeal. Like the others said, it was real satire, which wasn’t what sitcoms had done up to that point.
A few aspects hold up- Loretta Hager (Mary Kay Place) is beyond awesome (I wonder if they’ve put her album on CD). But the above explanations for its success at the time & its not aging well all ring true.
MH,MH also introduced us to Martin Mull & Dabney Coleman. Yay!
This pretty much. It was “real” straight faced satire, which is unnerving to many. We’re always looking for reassuring winks, and this show had few of them. In some ways it’s kind of similar to “The Larry Sanders Show” in being a dead on satire.
The Carol Burnett parody was a lot funnier, representing as it did a distilled and exaggerated form.
It doesn’t make sense to me how something could be both unsettling and funny at the same time.
And I watch CSI-type shows not for the unsettling, but the coolness of the mystery. If it were truly unsettling, I would no longer watch.
I think I don’t get it. Either that, or my humor meter is calibrated differently than it would have been in the '70s (had I not been starting grade school when this was on the air).
The scene in the first link, I could at least understand where it was supposed to be funny. I didn’t find it funny, though. The death scene was disturbing, about on the level of certain scenes on Sopranos. I didn’t think it was OMG SO OFFENSIVE, but I didn’t see any reason to laugh, so if it was supposed to be funny, I was whooshed*. The bit about Mary reading six magazines and watching Carson making her an “informed person” was interesting – finally, some irony. But it still wasn’t funny. I mean, in the amount of time it took to get to that, Frasier would have made me laugh probably six times.
Then with the second clip, call me Cher 'cause I’m clueless. Not offended this time either**, but not sure what to make of it. It just sounds like a real talk show, and a boring one. I couldn’t see any major flaws in her responses for most of the segment, so I couldn’t be sure what triggered the breakdown. And it doesn’t help to see it out of context; I don’t know why she’s there to be ganged up on, not to mention whether or not I should be on her side at this point in the series.
The Carol Burnett parody, OTOH, was excellent. But the way it’s so clearly a parody makes me wonder about the source material. I’m well aware that MH, MH was not supposed to be taken seriously. But it’s so ponderous that I’m wondering how far it is from its source material. If it’s parodying daytime soaps of the era, then I guess the satire will be forever lost on me, because I know nothing of that.
*And I didn’t quite understand the mechanics of it, either. If he was aware enough to struggle, why didn’t he succeed? It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t give me pause if it was animated, but live action isn’t supposed to use cartoon physics.
** Although I wish she would have kept her legs together in that miniskirt.
Well, there was Chuckles the Clown. (Mary Tyler Moore Show)
I didn’t get MH,MH at the time, but I was about 12.
No individual clip of Mary Hartman Mary Hartman was funny, not even in the first run. The comedy depended upon a cumulative effect – the deadpan lines, the slow pacing, the weird plot twists all added up over the course of a show and the run of the series to be very funny indeed. Even today, I can’t think of the International House of Pancakes without smiling. Or a station wagon full of nuns.
On first viewing at the time, the show was a deadpan satire of soap operas. But the twists and plotting was far more outrageous than soap operas of the time. The humor was very dry, too; it was not designed for belly laughs, but rather for knowing smiles as you understood what was being satirized and, later, as the characters got themselves into odd situations, which they accepted much like soap opera characters accept their absurdities.
Loretta’s singing career was by far the funniest subplot in the first season (especially her appearance on the Dinah Shore Show – that was a belly laugh).
It was easy not to get the show, even back then. Everything was played straight; there were no cues that this was a comedy (no laugh track, for instance). It was designed to look like a serious soap opera, too. It built and played very slowly (remember, this was broadcast five days a week) and much of the humor required that you work for it.
But you are not going to understand the show from a clip or even watching a single episode. You need to watch a week or two of shows, in order, to understand.
Pot was better in those days. 
As most posters said, you had to be there. It made for great water cooler talk. I remember it as groundbreaking also, but now seems sort of silly.
What I came in to say is that everything I wanted to say has been said by others,
I didn’t follow the show on a regular basis and was far from being a fan as such.
What I remember about it is that it was as groundbreaking and weird as Ernie Kovacs and MAD magazine had been in the 50’s. Silly for silly’s sake and to have the laugh be more on the guy or gal who didn’t get it as on the material itself.
If you want to wallow in that level of humor, spend some time with any or all of Christopher Guest’s offerings, especially Waiting for Guffman (1996).
Martin Mull, too.
The downstream effect it had on so many who came later has been mentioned upthread, and Letterman and Shandling are particularly indebted to it.
But the most salient thing is: You Had To Be There. Sorry, but it’s true. In much the same way, stuff that’s funny today needs that same ingredient. Look back in ten years and see if you can figure out what made today’s memes funny to anybody. When you do look back, remember the catchphrase and see how relevant it will be,
In many markets it was on after the 11 o’clock news. Perhaps it’s appeal was more to intellectual, hip, wealthier people looking for a deadpan satire of soap operas and everyday life. Since that time is also the era when VCRs were first coming on the market and were expensive ($1,000 to $1,500), this segment would be more likely to record and talk about it.
It was made by Norman Lear (“All in the Family”) and starred Woody Allen’s ex-wife Louise Lasser (back when Allen was making his early, funny films and highly regarded). Publications like “Time” and “Rolling Stone” might have put it on the cover because since their editors were in this segment, they thought everyone thought like them. If they didn’t, people would still talk about the show.
Some of the humor must be completely out of date. I remember the “NY Times” talking about when Hartman was in a mental institution and a patient saidHarry Reasoner would be joining them soon. That might mean nothing to people today but at the time Reasoner was the sole anchor of ABC news who, in a highly publicized move, was given the first female co-anchor in Barbara Walters. It didn’t work.
Just out of curiosity, does this mean you don’t like the movies of Sacha Baron Cohen? John Waters? Jerry Lewis?
Not that any of them are precisely the same as MH, MH.
My parents were into this show. I never got it either. Kind of reminds me of Soap, which was more accessible.
The hip crowd then was a lot smaller, and they were more of a crowd - mostly of the same generation and on the same page culturally, thanks to stuff like Vietnam and Watergate and pop psychology. It was a dark time for a lot of them because they were learning to be cynical. Funny-ha-ha didn’t fit the mood - deadpan, conceptual satire did. It’s still seen in Hollywood “industry” comedies such as Albert Brooks’ films and series like Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Kids these days. What I haven’t seen mentioned is that, during the 70’s, we didn’t have nearly the selection of shows on TV that we do today. In my dorm in the 70’s we had maybe 5 channels on the communal TV (one of which was dominated by Pat Robertson). Those few broadcaster tended to produce good but safe TV that would appeal to as many people as possible. A show like MH, MH was ground breaking in that it really was taking a chance with some of the material and it really was different from the rest of what was available. At 11:00 PM the choice was usually Mary or some sort of goofy old horror movie.
I wasn’t a fan at the time but it’s not really fair to compare to todays shows for many reasons.
I tried watching it when it was new, and I didn’t see the appeal then, either. But I’ve never been a fan of soap operas – the entire genre already creeps me out.