That Mork and Mindy was a spinofff
If you want to count it, All in the Family’s final spin-off was the very short lived 704 Hauser, which aired in 1994. It was set in the Bunker’s old house, now occupied by a black family. John Amos played the father, and in a reversal of the All in the Family dynamic, he had a conservative son who he was always arguing with. According to wikipedia, it had only 6 episodes, one of which was never aired. Memorable, if that’s the word, largely for an early appearance of Maura Tierney.
As for MTM, I admit I’ve never been able to see Rhoda’s supposed “pudginess” in the early episodes. I know that the episode “Rhoda the Beautiful,” where she loses a bunch of weight and wins the beauty contest, was evidently based on Valerie Harper’s actual weight loss. But to me, Rhoda always looked just the same before and after her “losing weight.” And I would have preferred Rhoda over Mary (like I would have had a shot with either one!), largely based on the fact that she just seemed cooler, and like she would be more fun to hang out with.
The difference between a spin-off (I can’t believe I’m having this conversation) is that a back-door pilot is for a series that is already planned, and inserts never-before-seen characters into an existing series for a single episode. The “Kelly’s Kids” ep. of the Brady Bunch is probably the best-known example, but the episode “Behave” of Law & Order: SVU that introduced the characters for L&O: LA is a recent example.
Mork was not a regular character on Happy Days. He appears once, and the ending sets up the premise of Mork and Mindy. It’s a back-door pilot.
Now, it is possible to have both. When the housekeeper on That show Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges did, cripes-- Diff’rent Strokes, yeah, with the apostrophe and all-- spun off into her own series, there was a back-door pilot with a Diff’rent Strokes ep. (I hated that show, but my brother liked it) set at the school, and introducing all the characters.
Back to MTM and Rhoda: Valerie Harper used to get dressed in a lot of baggy clothes; once she was dressed in tailored clothes, she had magically “lost weight.” IIRC, this happened right before the spin off. A lot of things happened right before the spin off that had her shedding her nebbishkeit, preparing to take on the “Mary” role on her own show, while Julie Kavner would be the nebbisher sidekick.
Nitpick: The producers had Rob, Laura, Buddy, and Sally “doing shows” whenever they could work it into the script. It could happen at a cocktail party, a resort in the Borscht Belt, the Petries’ living room, just about anywhere. (Sometimes it was like watching an old Judy Garland–Mickey Rooney movie: “Hey, I know! Let’s put on a show to help these guys out!”)
Check out this clip; brownie points if you can identify the guy on the drum!
Bob CraneNot too difficult to recognize.
But Mary Tyler Moore doing calypso; just doesn’t quite work, does it?
Calypso was very au courant back then, thanks to the popularity of Harry Belafonte. Even the original theme song for Gilligan’s Island, heard on the unaired pilot, was a calypso number:
They made fun of the "Let's put on a show!" trope on ***MTM***; this is one of my favorite episodes in the series:
I think it’s a case of “presentism.” It come across to us, in 2014 as a racial impersonation, with her fake accent and all, and we lump it in with Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but really, it’s not that different from an American doing a fake British accent when singing a Beatles’ song, or a Northerner using a fake Southern accent to sing “Georgia on my Mind.” But even knowing that, I cringe too.
And this is my “You Learn Something Every Day”.
She’s not the first goy to play a Jew, and I think she did a great job. So Valerie Harper wasn’t Jewish? you believed Rhoda was, and that was all that mattered.
I don’t have an offended (for lack of a better term) reaction, I just think “why would you listen to this when there’s a real Harry Belafonte out there?”
Mary Tyler Moore’s looks changed pretty dramatically over the years of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. She went from looking cute and young to looking slightly haggard and middle-aged within the space of maybe 5 years on that show.
No doubt the diabetes contributed, but MTM was also hitting the bottle really hard at that time, and was also very skinny - two things that tend to prematurely age people.
She’s not horrible to look at or anything - it just looks like she’s aged about 15 years during those seven seasons.
She was probably skinny because of the way diabetes was managed then-- she wasn’t so skinny on The DvD show. But she also, as Rhoda put in when either she guested on The MTM Show, or MTM guested on Rhoda, I don’t remember which, that MTM “managed to gain weight only in erogenous zones,” so I wonder if she had breast implants. And then I wonder if she had other work as well. A face lift, whether or not it succeeds in making you look younger, can change the shape of your face.
Also, diabetes all by itself can age you, or at least in the 70s it did. Because of glucometers, and insulins that act at different speeds to better mimic what the pancreas does, diabetes is much more easy to manage now than it was in the 70s.
MTM was not exactly flat chested even when young. When she was carrying a little more weight she looked quite well endowed:
That wasn’t my point. At the beginning of The MTM Show, she was thinner than she had been on DvD and smaller chested, which one would expect. At some point, she got more bosomy, without seeming to gain weight anywhere else.
I am not complaining about her looks. She was awfully thin on MTM, and IMO, looked better (ie, on DvD) when she wasn’t almost anorectic thin, but I think her thinness just had to do with the way diabetes was managed. Home glucometers didn’t exist until the 1980s, so people had to stick to a rigid diet, take their shots by the clock, and cross their fingers. If they felt that something was wrong, they had to go to the doctor or the ER for a blood glucose test.
The clothes they both wore were also really ugly. I’m always amused at how they’re just so utterly unflattering when I watch the show. Then men look almost as bad in the polyester stuff.
I always wind up feeling bad for MTM. She has great talent but a nasty disease, failed marriages and an only child who killed himself.
This. GQ was promoting white plastic buttons on navy blazers as the Next Big Thing, and I looked at the photo and thought “Jesus, that looks like something Mary Richards would’ve worn around Season Six!”
I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with Lou Grant and say that at any given time, Rhoda was probably the one who had spunk.
But he hates spunk, and he didn’t like Rhoda much.
Billie Newman had spunk, but you could tell she was trying to suppress it. Of course, Lou had mellowed by then. He even dated that police officer Susan Sherman (if they’d been giving out awards for single ep. performances back then, Frances McCain would have won one), who had more spunk than all of them together.
Eh? 
He never had much reason to interact with Rhoda, but he never seemed to bear her any animosity. At one point, he even hired her to redecorate his house (and felt guilty because he hated the results).
Yes, to the best of my memory, Lou and Rhoda got along fine. There was even an episode (“Lou’s Second Date”) where they were hanging out together so often that everyone assumed they were dating. And I note that Rhoda, unlike Mary, always called him “Lou.”