On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television MARY HARTMAN FACES LIFE BY MARVIN KITMAN For me, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was the underground sensation of the television industry last September. I had been unhinged by two...
...It ridicules morality, death, senior citizens, country music, newspaper reporters, floor wax, and those gorgeous plastic kitchens in American homes that have every convenience but only two spices: salt and pepper...
...A heroine concerned that her kitchen floor is yellow despite what it says on the can and in the commercials...
...Some TV viewers specialize in loving Star Trek...
...But all four networks turned it down for the fall season...
...Yet after everything is made right with her glistening world she goes into a fugue state...
...I think we're going to be quietly sucked into this one, while attacking the hell out of it all the way...
...While most daytime soap operas are tragedies, in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman Lear has given us a soap opera-situation comedy, a hybrid form that deserves a new name, perhaps "sitop...
...It seemed possible that Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, aired in the New York area at 11:00 pm., might even destroy the traditional 11 o'clock news shows...
...This was the first major problem the heroine faced in the continuing story of one woman's life and times in (mythical) Femwood, Ohio...
...When the news came that Lear had managed to sell the show to a fifth "network" of 91 local stations, I awaited Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman Day (January 6) feeling warm and kindly toward television...
...I anticipated people talking about Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman's Grandpa Larkin, a lovable old gentleman who in the second episode turns out to be the notorious "Fernwood Flasher...
...No one ever outgrows the love for a bedtime story...
...Where would As the World Turns be if after only two or three episodes everybody had viciously started calling it As the Stomach Turns...
...I still think it's fun to watch Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman cope with life beyond the commercials...
...But there's usually something funny in every installment in a very sad and crazy way...
...Would the news shows on the network channels run bulletins at the bottom of the screen reporting the latest Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman developments...
...Soap opera lovers prefer their characters to have simpler problems, like amnesia...
...And maybe one is wrong to get enthusiastic about a show that is nothing more than a back-handed slap at everything in society...
...It ridicules the heroine herself...
...I thought they would be talking about Mary Hartman, Mary Hart-man's cool...
...I knew 1976 would not be another rerun year of family-hour mediocrity...
...On the upper or comedy level, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is not zippy like Maude...
...In fact, the humor is so subtle sometimes it is almost undiscernible...
...A sitop as electronic Scheherazade will have a profound and happy effect on marriages...
...I have the feeling that Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is going to have lasting impact...
...My wife is always warning me that it's one thing to go out on a limb, another to go out on a twig...
...I had been unhinged by two controversial advance pilots of the Norman Lear program...
...I only remember one line in the third episode...
...Some people love Monty Hall so much they watch him on the Wednesday and Friday night editions of Let's Make a Deal...
...Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is a show that ridicules...
...Mass murders...
...Somehow, I had finally managed to have the least popular opinion in the history of television criticism...
...This had to be wonderful...
...The next night she lies perfectly still in bed and with eyes rolling lasciviously tells her husband, "I'm not doing anything...
...The morning after the show premiered, I was sure people who had been thinking of kicking in their sets would be at peace with television again...
...But most of the talk about the show that I heard dwelt on how awful Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was...
...Isn't that what you want me to do...
...And people who are watching for laughs don't think there is anything funny about the male headache...
...I ridicule everything in sight...
...Possibly, if Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman had stuck to the common cold or pneumonia, it wouldn't be in such critical disrepute...
...Despite having misplaced his pants somewhere, he wins the fashion award of the year: for the best wearing of a raincoat...
...And since Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was soap opera, it needed time to develop...
...My passion for ridicule has affected my work as a writer...
...When a neighbor barges into her house to report a mass murder right on the block—some maniac had killed the entire Lombardi family, the husband, wife and three children, as well as their two goats and eight chickens—an unruffled Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman asks, "Do you want some coffee...
...Always innocent and intensely preoccupied with life's adversities, she can be genuinely mortified that her husband has ringaround-the-collar...
...But it is the best new thing to hit the airwaves this season...
...And it is habit-forming...
...Miss Television Commercial America is an honestly depressed person...
...The new Norman Lear thing," as the star of the serial, Louise Lasser, had been calling the promos, would be the biggest boon to conversation since the Alka-Seltzer man said, "I ate the whole thing...
...On the basement or lower, soap-opera level, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is the continuing story of a different kind of character right out of the real life documented in the commercials...
...Everybody in town apparently despised it...
...A grandfatherly type who speaks eloquently about the rights of senior citizens only to reveal himself as the town exhibitionist...
...Maybe it would be better if Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman ran only three minutes a night—the length of a commercial break—instead of 30...
...Who would want to see a solemn announcer reading the same boring stuff, mostly repeated from the six o'clock news, when he had the chance to find out what new zany things were happening in the life of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman...
...At a period in TV history when most new shows don't even work on one level, it appeared to me that this series should be especially appreciated for working on two...
...Sure enough, the first episodes of the series registered "King Kong" ratings, burying the news programs...
...And I thought they would be talking about Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman's private life...
...Her husband, Tom, a blue-collar worker in the town's automobile assembly plant, believes she should wait for him to make the advances...
...Following the emotionally upsetting experience of getting Grandpa Larkin out of jail for the second time, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman asks the policeman on duty if he knows a good House of Pancakes...
...In the first two episodes, run back-to-back for the premiere in most cases, she has just read a Reader's Digest article urging the women of America to become more socially aggressive...
...And the show still says more about what's happening today in American civilization than the 11 o'clock news...
...Valiantly I tried to remind people that All in the Family was not widely praised at first...
...Just because every sophisticated, witty, intelligent person I know hates Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, that is no reason why I can't like it...
...Although he has been arrested for perhaps the one crime soap opera had not previously gone into, Grandpa Larkin maintains his dignity...
...Lear's situation comedies are a kind of soap box opera...
...A third of the time the show hits its targets...
...Discussions that might seem painful under the cold kitchen light will be warm and loving in the privacy of the bedroom after this TV show...
...I think it may have touched a raw nerve the first week...
...Tom felt that Mary initiated sex too often...
...The major problem Mary, Mary and her husband discussed was their sex relations...
...Lustful housewives...
...I happen to enjoy anything that ridicules...
...People would be calling me Marvin Kitman, Marvin Kitman...
...They would be echoing "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" in the marvelous whiny voice that is the background to the opening billboard...
...All she had to do was look at him and Tom thought that constituted initiating sex...
...For not only does everybody scream their topical, socially involved jokes, reflecting the latest in ACLU-type dogma espoused by Lear off screen, but there is often a bittersweet, maudlin resolution of plot that can make the audience cry—the famed Learian fake moment of truth...
...the rest of the time it clearly misses, as do the leading ridiculous shows (Monty Python's Flying Circus and Saturday Night...
...She is truly happy when her french fries are not oily, happy when her floors and coffee are right...
...Then when I feel like doing it," he explains logically, "I'll do it...
...Norman Lear, of course, is the inventor of the modern TV situation comedy: shows like All in the Family and Maude where characters speak out at the top of their lungs about the great issues of the day, as if they were in Hyde Park (London) or Union Square (New York), rather than in a living room (Burbank or Universal City...
...I suspected, too, that the viewers would be talking about Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman's fear of "waxy yellow build-up" on her kitchen floor...
...What is there about Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman that has produced such a strong negative reaction to it...
Vol. 59 • February 1976 • No. 3
