I’ve been looking for a new show to binge watch, and I saw “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” on a list of all-time great TV shows, so I decided to give it a try. It was a bit before my time, so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect – maybe something like “Murphy Brown”?
I’ve watched the first 17 episodes, and there is one thing I have noticed so far: there are way more episodes than I expected where Mary has to give some creepy dude the brush-off. Out of 17 shows so far, I’d conservatively say that 5 show straight up sexual harassment with a couple of "maybe"s:
[ul]
[li]Episode 2, “Today I am a Ma’am”: Mary and Rhoda decide to jazz up their social life by inviting a couple of guys over for drinks. Mary calls up a guy she dated once named Howard Arnell and he turns out to have been obsessing over her for years. (Apparently dating psychos is so common in Mary’s life that she totally forgot about him.) [/li][li]Episode 4, “Divorce Isn’t Everything”: Mary and Rhoda join a club for divorced people to get a group rate on a trip to Paris. The club is full of losers, including a dentist who has an unhealthy fixation on Mary’s teeth. I’ll put this in the “maybe” pile; there’s nothing particularly immoral about being a loser or a tooth fetishist, but it’s still a bit creepy.[/li][li]Episode 9, “Bob and Rhoda and Teddy and Mary”: Rhoda brings her boyfriend over for Mary to meet, and then a day later he unceremoniously dumps her over the phone saying he’s more interested in Mary (who showed nothing more than polite interest in him). Not a creep, just an asshole.[/li][li]Episode 11, “1040 or Fight”: Mary gets audited, which involves a creepy dude coming over to her apartment every night and pressuring her into dating him. He drags out the audit so long (just as an excuse to keep meeting up with Mary) that he gets in trouble with his boss, but he doesn’t even give a shit. Total creep, and nowadays the IRS would fire him in a heartbeat.[/li][li]Episode 13, “He’s All Yours”: Lou hires his 21-year-old nephew as a cameraman, but nobody likes him. Mary has pity on him and invites him over for dinner, and he assumes she wants to bone. When Mary turns him down, he makes up a bullshit story about being a virgin in hopes of getting a pity screw. Creep.[/li][li]Episode 15, “Howard’s Girl”: Even after telling Howard Arnell to get lost in Episode 2, he is still telling his parents that he’s engaged to Mary and the parents refuse to believe her when she says they aren’t.[/li][li]Episode 17, “Just a Lunch”: Mary is initially interested in Lou’s old buddy, but when she realises he’s still married, she asks him to stay away. Naturally, that just encourages him to follow her around at work and to a party so that he can keep giving her the hard sell. Ew.[/li][/ul]
I wonder if it’ll get better or worse by the time I reach Season 7.
This is a culture clash. Back in the 70’s, the feminist ideal was a woman living on her own who could handle pervy men just fine, thanks. An unwanted grope would result in a slap and being shown the door, not a lawsuit followed by psychiatric care for the trauma. So showing Mary effortlessly navigating creeps and needy men was seen as female empowerment, and not male evil.
Feminists back then felt that women were just as tough as men and could deal with garden variety boorishness just fine. Today, modern feminism seems to be more about saying that women need an intense amount of sheltering because they are just so fragile. It’s almost Victorian.
When we watched the show then, we saw these types of guys as just desperate losers, and women would just tell them to take a hike. Getting rid of a guy that pawed her didn’t make Mary a damaged victim, it showed how tough she was.
I guarantee that no one who watched the show at the time thought the kinds of things you’re thinking here. They just thought, 'What a creep! Way to go, Mary! You showed him."
I found it odd that all of the guys she met looked as though they’d just walked off the set of a cheap porn flick. Plus, they were all really, *really *stupid. I wouldn’t see a population of men that uniformly stupid until Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman came on in the '90s.
You have to keep in mind that the show is a sitcom (“situation comedy”) and as sitcoms do, especially in the era when MTM was being made, they tended to recycle the same general plot lines again and again and again. On “Bewitched”, Endora would cast a spell on Darren right before he has to make a big pitch to a client. On “Three’s Company”, there would be a misunderstanding about a situation leading to someone thinking there was some hanky panky going on. On “the Mary Tyler Moore Show”, Mary would have to fend off some obnoxious jerk would-be suitor. It’s just a routine staple plot line for the show that the writers found worked well one time, so they did it again and it worked as well. So they kept writing stories on the premise. I don’t think there’s any more to it than that.
It’s not going to spoil anything to say Howard Arnell will show up a couple more times in the next few seasons (fun fact - Richard Schaal, who played Howard, was the real-life husband of Valerie Harper.)
It’s also not going to spoil anything to say Mary occasionally will date some not creepy dudes over the next few seasons. The show is about an attractive, young-ish, single woman, after all.
Some of what you’re seeing right now is what TVTropes likes to call “Early Installment Weirdness” as the writers and the actors define the characters and stories. They’re going to change the lyrics to the theme song, too. Give it time.
What?!? Where do you get this crap? Modern feminism is about equality, not sheltering. The equality to not be harassed like Mary was, you know like men don’t have to endure.
This. There is nothing particularly “sheltered” or “fragile” about thinking that your tax auditor or your dinner date or your wannabe-fiance or your married friend-of-a-colleague whom you have already turned down should be leaving you the fuck ALONE. Sheesh.
It’s the sexist assumption that men’s persistently pestering women who have made it clear they’re not interested is just normal and non-pathological “garden variety boorishness”, which women are just expected to grin and bear, that is being rejected by a lot of modern feminists.
It amazes me how some people, mainly men, are absolutely flabbergasted that women are speaking out and making a BFD against idiot knuckledragging harrassiing, raping, groping MEN, WTF? Why is it so hard to grasp? This was, is, and probably will be a vomitous, nasty problem women have, do, and will put up with, and the outraged knuckledraggers of the world will have to stuff it.
And I don’t think there were a terrible lot of disgusting idiot men, maybe a bit more than usual for comic and story value, for Mary to deal with. God knows, I dated for 25 years off and on in between long term relationships, and 8 out of 10 men I dated were losers or creeps or too boring to bear. I was lucky in that even back in the 70’s I felt there was no reason to put up with the shitheads and got away unharmed.
While this is all true (especially “Three’s Company”, which was essentially the same idiotic plot every week and a complete waste of John Ritter’s talents), from the stories relayed to me by female friends who are actively dating it doesn’t really sound like the scenarios listed by the o.p. are really all that exaggerated or unusual even today, and probably even less so back when the show was in first run broadcast. I literally have a female friend who went on a date that ended up going to a gun range, a taco truck (not a gourmet truck, just the normal white trucks that go to factories), and then a strip club. When I asked why she didn’t cut and run after the taco truck, her response was to the effect that it wasn’t the worst date she’d been on because at least the guy was actually paying for everything without hinting that she should offer to split or complaining about the costs, and plus, the gun range was at least a novel date idea. So, I assume, was the strip club, but it seemed to be considerably less well received.
If Mary Tyler Moore were dating today, she’d probably be getting dick pics and propositions for threesomes every other episode, and it still wouldn’t be that much (or perhaps at all) of an exaggeration.
Yeah, the show will change a lot over the years and the dating aspect will be downplayed in favor of more office episodes as Mary gains stature and responsibility.
I may be alone in this, but I thought the show got a lot better after Rhoda and Phyllis left and Georgette and Sue Ann took their places. (I know they technically were introduced earlier but they were effectively replacements.) Much funnier and more interesting characters plus they put the show’s focus on the office where it belonged.
I thought it got much better after the focus shifted away from Mary to the other characters,* and when it turned out she wasn’t exactly perfect either. The first time she had a crappy party at her place was a breath of fresh air.
The same was true of MASH** when the stories weren’t about Hawkeye.
I always remembered the time Mary dated a man much shorter than her. Given that I am a fairly short man (I’m 5’6") the whole premise kinda pissed me off – Oh, Mary Richards, how incredibly progressive of you, deigning to enjoy the company of a man who doesn’t tower over you. Oh, how difficult gender relations were in the US at this time, where you might have to make small talk with a short man. Pfft. In the real world of the 1970’s, Dudley Moore was dating supermodel Susan Anton. Ok, maybe it helps to rich, famous, and charming if you want leggy supermodel arm-candy.
Thing is, dating or more interesting story lines, it didn’t matter – Mary Tyler Moore had great comedic timing and knew how to emote intensity with just enough subtlety to make the characters believable.
However, the 1970’s issues they had to deal with made me think “Huh? Is that really an important issue?”
I saw that episode. I can see how it came off as a bit patronizing, but I felt it was a nice change of pace to have her going out with someone who was better than her instead of a jerk or a loser. The moral of the story was something like “everyone has their own hangups, so don’t stress out about it too much”.
HUH? I haven’t been on a date for 30 years…but geez, what woman (or man) goes on a date without knowing where they are going?
That seems creepier to me than all the male-creepiness this thread has mentioned.
A guy on the phone says “let’s go out Saturday night”, and the woman doesn’t reply with “great idea!—where?”
Nobody suggests, say, a disco, or a movie, or a pub, or maybe dinner at Applebees? Is there no other discussion?
Sorry—but I just don’t get it.
And I’m going to agree with Sam Stone in post #2: MTM was a true feminist in the 70’s. She stood up for herself.
She’d invite men into her apartment, and throw them out if she wanted. Today’s snowflakes are all about helplessness and victimhood.
(Sorry,mods… I know this is CS. But the thread is not only about Mary Tyler Moore–it’s also about creepy behavior.)
That’s how I remember it too and I do think it has a lot to do with the context of the time. Yes this was a show that featured an independent woman (really a person becoming one) and it was in the context of most comedies that featured women as defined by their relationships to men, either as wives or in pursuit of romance as their defining features. First impulse of the writers was in context of that and to show the character in the context of men that were not the heroes and not the Prince Charmings or knights in shining armor. After a bit they got comfortable having established that she was not needing a man to define who she was, was happy to have one and fine with rejecting one just as well. It spoke to the reality that many women were experiencing of dating jerks and creeps and becoming comfortable with their long term identity being defined other than by way of who they were involved with or in pursuit of (or parent of).
And I also recall the show getting better as it finished establishing that as who Mary Richards was and moved on. She could date and have sex (or not as she chose) and not be defined by those men. Friendships and her professional life defined her and provided the better comedy. This was pretty new for the era’s sitcoms.
