In this age of important TV, when so much serious meaning can be extrapolated, the importance of inoffensive and seemingly innocent series can be easily forgotten. I mean those series on network TV that most people grew up with.
The recent death of Mary Tyler Moore puts all of this in perspective.
Moore was an influential figure not because she wrote or produced series of psychological depth and approached issues in contemporary society with the urgency of sociological analysis. She was influential because of what she embodied and represented through the characters she played on what seemed slight, gag-driven situation comedies. She didn't create The Mary Tyler Moore Show (that was James L. Brooks and Allan Burns) but on it, she played U.S. television's first main character who was a never-married, independent career woman.
Today, the show looks dated and cutesy, but some of the cringe-inducing aspects are tempered by people's nostalgia for the character and the time. The show was only revolutionary in the mildest manner. Yet, innocuous TV shows can have enormous power.
In a memoir about growing up in Ireland at the time television arrived there, I wrote a lot about the formidable impact that TV shows, mainly from 1950s America, had on the Ireland of the early 1960s. Ireland was then a closed society, deeply conservative, deeply religious and a dark place, especially for women. "Television arrived and with it the hints of glamour, modernity and sophistication," I wrote. "The angelus bells still rang on Irish television to remind everyone of the faith of their mothers, fathers and forefathers, but in my house and in my mind, the angelus was only an interruption between entertaining programs and stories."
It wasn't just on me that the impact was vital. Irish women, restricted in their roles, looked at The Donna Reed Show with awe. They saw a world not just sunnier than their own, but they were given new role models for women in Ireland and shown families that didn't constantly have to refer to the church or the state or any specific orthodoxy. This was a tipping point in Irish history. Later, Irish women would see the sexually charged figures of Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 in Get Smart and raven-haired, long-legged and wickedly haughty Emma Peel, played by Diana Rigg, in The Avengers and not see them as part of a mindless entertainment culture but as figures of influence and impact.
Television, even in its most manufactured, seemingly insipid form, can kick open the shutters in a closed society. In cities and already liberal areas of the United States, Mary Tyler Moore's character Mary Richards might have been seen as a charming figure, a sanitized Hollywood version of an independent, liberated young woman. But in other places, in smaller towns and on the fringes, the character Mary was fiercely new and different.
U.S. network sitcoms, in some contexts, are not mindless entertainment. They are alien and, ultimately, dangerous stories. They show people comfortable in their skins, untroubled by the weight of tradition or orthodoxy. Eyes have been opened by these shows, and complacency has been shattered.
There is, of course, a lot more to Mary Tyler Moore's career than one sitcom from the early 1970s. She had her own production company, created with her husband, Grant Tinker, and the company, MTM Enterprises, produced many very fine shows. As such, Moore was a groundbreaking businesswoman, in control of her work and her financial destiny.
But what people mourn, on her death, is the figure of Mary Richards, 30, an independent single woman working in a newsroom. To some viewers, the women's liberation movement and all the energy behind it was probably far away, distant, as remote as the moon. But Mary Richards was there on TV, week after week after week. Disproving Gil Scott-Heron's oft-repeated chant that "the revolution will not be televised," this was a revolution on TV, as a female character defied social norms for 22 minutes every week.
Mary Richards didn't so much turn the world on with her smile as she turned some closed worlds upside-down. She gave succour and strength to women isolated and insecure, for whom some independence and a career seemed a defiant and dangerous route to take. And the succour and strength emanated from a seemingly innocuous sitcom. Never underestimate the importance of that genre of television.