Well, it was dark (see: character who drowned in a bowl of chicken soup). Plus, it was a soap opera of sorts, though a parody of same. So if you were forbidden from watching any soaps, I could certainly see why MH, MH would have been verboten.
OK, soaps I kinda get (not for teenage kids, but for younger ones). CHiPS, well, I would kinda chalk that up to something kids wouldn’t probably want to watch anyway, but there was plenty of (implied) violence, plenty of criminals, and lots of car chases, etc. But seriously, Donnie and Marie? Seriously? What the heck was he afraid of? The fact that Donnie was 'a little bit rock ‘n roll’??:smack:
Just sayin’.
As to the OP: I grew up watching my mother’s soap operas (unwillingly; there was one TV in the house, she commanded it from the time she got up in the morning until she went to bed at night, and she liked her soaps). And I was the right age/era. I thought Mary Hartman was a riot. Of course, I also liked SNL back in the days of Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, John Belushi, et al.
Mary Kay Place has had some success as a character actress but Lasser had too many problems with substance abuse and general weirdness (the Carol Burnett parody makes reference to that). I think one reason why MHMH caused discomfort among viewers was the realization that they were perhaps watching Lasser’s personal meltdown bleed into her character on the screen (especially in the later in the show’s run).
I think it was on the forbidden list for me, as I don’t remember it at all aside from mentions of the name, but the Wiki summary says that it also tended to use the explicit terms for issues that soaps danced around and referred to obliquely. The examples given were impotence and sexual perversion. So it sounds like not just a parody of a soap but also a soap opera taken to an extreme (for the times).
As for the issue with the pacing - I haven’t watched soaps for over a decade, but I saw a bit of a soap opera last week while on vacation, and I don’t think times have changed that much! Lots of very slow, dramatic reaction shots and multiple story lines create a very slow-paced show.
For those whose moms or friends were big soap opera fans did they like “Mary Hartman”? And if they did was it more as a parody of soap operas or a conventional soap opera?
Other posters have described the show’s bizarre appeal; RealityChuck in post 12 hit the nail on the head perfectly. It is difficult to convey to younger people how when the showed aired there was nothing like it on TV and never had been. It was utterly different. And of course we were all stoned. All the time. And the entire palate of media was smaller then, without the intertubes and a million cable/satellite channels and the cell phones and portables. So media events like this were shared by more people. In the Boise area it didn’t show on weeknights, but was broadcast as 3 shows on Saturday night and 2 on Sunday night. My grandmother and I were hooked on it; if possible we watched it together; if not we’d call up and talk about the episodes on Monday.