On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television ACTING YOUR AGE BY MARVIN KITMAN OLD Brown Eyes is back. You might say Mary Tyler Moore has had a kind of double comeback. She returned last December in her first new situation...
...And a law of the television business has it that if someone wrote for M*A*S*H, then he must be good...
...The story line is no big deal...
...Sheis almost a textbook case of the mother who prevents her sons from marrying...
...The originality of the title aside, she has succeeded in leaving her TV past behind her...
...Valerie, too, has wound up in Chicago—suburban Oak Park—but as Mrs...
...A major fiasco, Mary I vanished mercifully in midseason...
...Her first words would be, "Eat, Rhoda, eat...
...Finally, there is teen-age son David (Jason Bateman...
...cA: Van Dyke Show liberated...
...Her best friend is "Eye on Chicago" columnist Jo Tucker (Katey Sagal...
...The script was so bad, it had to be entirely rewritten by the actors and producers on the set...
...Yet no matter how the writers try to hide the fact, the changes are cosmetic...
...Mediocrity does not command respect in TV Land unless it costs at least $9,000 (the Writers' Guild minimum for a half-hour comedy script...
...Once again she is surrounded by a group of supposedly colorful, loveable characters...
...This is not the first time Mare's presence alone has failed to turn a bad conception into a success...
...and (3) Mary's character is wrong—she's doing what she did a decade ago, even though she is not the same person today...
...The apartment in Chicago may be schmaltzier...
...As they explain in the series opener, they are not identical: "The eggs split off from the ova...
...In short, this mother is a classic noodge, a busybody...
...He didn't seem to realize the producers were satirizing a sleazy fictitious paper in New York, called the Post...
...Mary Moore, as we insiders call her, or Mare, is the greatest, and it's good to have her back on television before 2 or 3 a.m...
...Not enough writers...
...The three minor problems plaguing the latest incarnation of our heroine are easy to list: (1) The program isn't very funny...
...After the episode aired, the producer got a call from the writer...
...That turned out to be the Carol Burnett Show without Carol, or Harvey Korman or Tim Conway...
...Mary married to a TV network president—say, Grant Tinker—would have been a funnier premise for a new sitcom, or even Mary married to a brilliant young heart surgeon from New York...
...Hogan, mother of four: three kids and one husband...
...Theater critic Ed LaSalle (John Astin) champions abstract expressionism in the neighborhood playhouse...
...She said it was fine for Kate & Allie and the Cosby Show to shoot in New York City, because they had all the writers...
...She seems immature for her age, though, and everybody's happy about the relationship except Valerie...
...Watching Valerie Harper always makes me nervous...
...While I hate to differ with Mary, I will categorically assert that many cabbies in Manhattan are better scribblers than the hacks grinding out the sitcoms in California...
...The acorn doesn't fall far from the oak, after all...
...What are old friends for...
...In the second show, she tries to interest David in a different sort of girl...
...That worked pretty good," he said...
...Meanwhile, he ran around to other producers' offices, continuing his important work of being a great M*A*S*H writer on their projects...
...These frat brothers could match quips with Webster on the next Network Battle of the Stars—or race to see which child's cleverness can make you throw up faster...
...At 16, he is the kind of kid who drives a BMW...
...Her children can have their own values, naturally, as long as they are exactly like hers...
...Her spouse (Josh Taylor) is an international pilot who seems to get jet lag just coming down to the kitchen...
...The paper was known as the Post until the publisher of a Windy City suburban weekly shopper bearing the same name threatened a suit...
...Soon you realize Valerie is just like Rhoda's mother, Ida Morgenstern...
...Valerie continually exhorts her sons to clarify their feelings and priorities...
...I love Mary Tyler Moore...
...In the end, they used three of his words, including "and," "the" and "but...
...Let's do it again...
...But the truth is that a lot of them were actually not so terrific...
...That may be me overreacting...
...She looks so anorexic, I'm afraid she's going to faint if I don't laugh...
...Tully (David Byrne), the copy editor, is nearly blind...
...Anyway, Mary's M*A*S*H writers haven't done the trick...
...She really plays to win in games such as Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit...
...1 hope it landed in the Smithsonian, instead of in some thrift shop...
...Mary Richards—I mean Moore—plays Mary Brenner...
...When that didn't quite happen, t he series was put in drydock for a video facelift and rescheduled for Tuesday, 9:00 p.m...
...Of course, Mary has a boss, Managing Editor Frank DeMarco (James Farentino), except here he openly pursues her, and the paper's level is a reflection of his personality...
...She may log enough passenger miles for a free trip to the Bronx...
...Regrettably, the only prize Mary Tyler Moore will win this year is the Most Frequent Flyer award...
...1 love that hat she used to throw up in the air at the end of the Mary Tyler Moore credits...
...Very fortunate for them...
...I don't like to make free suggestions to those guys sitting around the pool in California...
...But there weren't enough writers in the Big Apple for her show too, so she would have to schlep to LA every week and return to New York on weekends to be with her husband...
...She has been an inspiration to everyone with three names, as well as a comfort to insomniacs who watched her reruns in the dark, early hours when nothing else was stirring— not even a mouse practicing a stupid pet trick for the David Letterman Show...
...Given entries like Tough Cookies, Fast Times, Foley Square, and Melba—which was canceled during the first commercial break one night in January—it's not surprising that CBS hoped Mary would salvage the season, or seasons (the TV networks have become ballet companies...
...She is no longer an unmarried ca-reerwoman, adepartment store window dresser or a New York fashion designer...
...Instead of sighing, "Oh, Rob," at the first sign of a crisis, or getting stepped on by her rude, indifferent friends, the new Mary more aggressively asserts herself...
...Cum laude graduates of the Hollywood School for Cute 13-Year-Olds, they prove that the primary goal of pedagogical theory in Los Angeles is to produce children more like Oscar Wilde than Cornel Wilde...
...I love her charm, her looks, her warmth, her smile, her long legs...
...When CBS gets up the nerve to cancel Mary, maybe Mary Richards-Brenner can move in with Rhoda Valerie Hogan and her family...
...Hard as you may find it to believe, the writer-creators of Mary have the best credentials in the business...
...Everyone can do his thing, so long as mom approves...
...That's like telling young women to go west because there aren't enough marriageable Jewish doctors in New York...
...She has switched from a Minneapolis TV newsroom to a sleazy Chicago daily's newsroom...
...It's nice to have both Mary and Rhoda back on television in the same year...
...One of my favorite inside stories is about a great M*A*S*H writer—who shall remain anonymous—assigned to do a script...
...2) its people aren't loveablc enough...
...Mom tries to break it up...
...There was another Mary—the 1978 CBS variety series forgotten by everyone but loyal Mary Tyler Moore camp followers...
...She returned last December in her first new situation comedy since hanging up her hat in 1977 on the original Mary Tyler Moore Show...
...Indeed, the new show is old cliapeau...
...So I feel like a rat for saying this, but I have to spit it out: Mary doesn't work...
...Two of the kids—Willie (Danny Ponce) and Mark (Jeremy Licht)—are twins...
...Her problem is that she's a little overinvolved in her children's lives...
...You expect Nancy Walker to drop by any minute and start wiping up spills with the Bounty "picker-uppers" that she has brought in her Zabar's shopping bags—like Molly Poppins from the Bronx...
...in fact, not since that long-run hit decided to quit have so many of its alumni worked together on a television project...
...But Mary Brenner is too much the Mare we knew when...
...By comparison, Mary II is only a minor fiasco...
...You would think it \\asob\ious, though, that Mary needs a completely different story where she can portray someone older, more mature, who has to deal with real-life matters...
...Creator Charlie Hauck—even though he didn't work onM*A*S*H— has captured a well-meaning, smothering maternal type that many of us know...
...EST...
...Valerie Hogan is an effective character for a sitcom...
...The episode also received an Emmy nomination for best writing in a sitcom (no, it didn't win...
...People write in to tell her about their problems and she helps them...
...Perhaps there really are a mere seven writers in New York qualified to write for television, considering its incredibly high standards, but I doubt it...
...despite some superficial changes...
...EST...
...But Valerie is funny...
...Valerie is one of those wonderful mothers everyone wishes they had...
...Their many differences notwithstanding, she finds herself attracted to DeMarco...
...There is a marvelous mystique about M*A*S*H writers...
...You could argue this is Laura Petrie of the...
...He turned it in and collected his $9,000...
...What a guilt trip she manages to send her kids on...
...In the premiere episode, David has a date with a woman eight years older than he is...
...She should be acting Iter age already—that is, the 53-year-old woman she is now...
...the temperature may be 12 degrees cooler in Minneapolis...
...It's disgusting...
...Hillary, not one of the typical bimbettes David usually takes out, is an intellectual who jokes about reading novels by the Flying Karamazov Brothers...
...Her smile was supposed to restore the sparkle to the one-time Tiffany Network of Comedy in a show called—let me check my notes here—Mary (CBS, Wednesday, 8:30p.m...
...I still remember Mare's frank discussions last winter explaining why her show had to be made in California...
...She deviously ties them to her apron strings, while telling them to be more independent...
...They come from M*A*S*H...
...No woman good enough for them has been created yet...
...The scary part is that the guy didn't even know he hadn't written the script...
...She is attractive, swift and vivacious—yet vulnerable, full of human traits...
...Mary does the "Helpline" column...
...MARE'S OLD FRIEND Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper) has had more luck in her own new show, called Ka/erie (NBC, Monday, 8:30p.m...
Vol. 69 • February 1986 • No. 4
