I have recently found this website where every single episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (and many, many other tv shows) is available to watch online. This makes me very, very happy. Watching Mary Tyler Moore feels like returning to the womb. It is, along with M*A*S*H, an experience of deep cultural familiarity; it is a show that was, quite literally, the background noise to my very earliest years, and, then, of course, there is Rhoda.
If you haven't ever seen MTM you can't fully know the power of performance and character that is Rhoda Morgenstern (played by Valerie Harper). She is Mary's loud, Jewish, not-thin, upstairs neighbor with chutzpah. She is the one with thick thighs (such a relief after watching stick-thin Mary prance around in mini-skirts) who suggests that she and "Mare" become members of a social club for divorced people (even thought they are not divorced) in order to a) meet single men and b) get cheap plane tickets to Europe. Rhoda is the female sidekick prototype for television in the last quarter of the 20th century; Rhoda is brassy and insecure, and oh how I love her.
The show aired in 1970 -- five years before I was born. It only ran until 1977, so my claim to MTM as the womb of my childhood is curious and ahistorical. Of course my mom watched the show when I was little (and even, I imagine, when I was in utero). But there is also the fact that The Mary Tyler Moor Show reminds me of the women in my family. I look at pictures from the 70s of my Aunt Kathy in her head scarves and hoop earrings, and I remember my mother's MTM-esque black, leather, knee-high boots, her forays into yoga and wheat grass, and I recall stories of my grandmother, gorgeous, thin, and recently divorced, living in New York and fighting off many suitors while she pursued her own career, and I realize that the show resonates as a cultural template and reflection of a cultural moment; my mom, grandma and aunt are my Mary, Rhoda, and Phyllis.
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2 comments:
I'm kinda sad that nobody has anything to say about MTM. (C'mon, not even Jerry! Natalie?)
So, I will comment myself. Soon after posting this I talked to my mom about Mary Tyler Moore as a feminist television vanguard. She said two really interesting things: she, too, always liked Rhoda better than Mary, and, she thinks that _That Girl_ with Marlo Thomas as an independent career girl was more groundbreaking in a number of ways (including the fact that Marlo Thomas is Lebanese...)
Ok, I'll step up to the er, keyboard, and comment....
MTM is so not the background of my childhood, so much that I can't say I'd heard of her in a significant way. (Although Sam came down while I was watching the YouTube of her and he said what are you watching--Mary Tyler Moore? And HE was the one who didn't have a TV half his childhood.) Thanks for continuing to enlarge my cultural horizons, Amy. You're the best.
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