Trivia / The Mary Tyler Moore Show

• Ability over Appearance: The producers almost didn't hire Valerie Harper because while her performance was spot on, they felt she was too pretty to play Mary's frumpy best friend. They later decided to cast her anyway but would dress her in ungainly and frumpy clothing.
• Actor-Shared Background: Mary Tyler Moore is indeed a failed ballet dancer, much like her character. "I'm a failed dancer but a successful actress" she always said in interviews.
• Baddie Flattery: Not within the show, but the show was the former Trope Namer: "You got spunk, I hate spunk!"
• Breakup Breakout: An interesting aversion in that everyone but the namesake star found success after the show. MacLeod, Knight and White moved on to roles that rivaled their Mary Tyler Moore characters in popularity with The Love Boat, Caddyshack and The Golden Girls, respectively. Ed Asner became a household name in his own right, while Harper and Leachman found steady work in television all the way until their deaths. While Moore received an Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role in the film Ordinary People, her subsequent films never reached similar success and many of the television programs she had a lead role in tended to get cancelled after a short run.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Gavin MacLeod originally auditioned for the role of Lou Grant.
  • The role of Ted Baxter was written with Jack Cassidy in mind, but the actor wasn't interested in another sitcom commitment so soon after the failure of his critically acclaimed Short-Runner sitcom He & She. He would eventually guest star as Ted's brother in one episode.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • "Murray Can't Lose" gives Georgia Engel (Georgette) a chance to show off her singing and dancing skills with a big musical production number to the song "Steam Heat".
  • Subverted in the same episode with Mary, who suggests putting herself in the talent show but thinks better of it after trying out a hilariously inept attempt to sing "One for My Baby".
• Creator Backlash: The producers of the series have expressed in interviews that one of the worst episodes was "Some of My Best Friends Are Rhoda", in which Mary confronts her new friend, Joanna Forbes (played by Mary Frann), about her anti-Semitism. Everyone involved in the episode agreed it fell flat and was tonally way off-key for the series. "We are not Maude," Mary Tyler Moore said of the episode, which was attempting to tiptoe into topical and political All in the Family territory. The show stayed away from confrontational Norman Lear-ish envelope pushing after this episode.
• The Danza:
  • Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards.
  • Ted Knight, as Ted Baxter, is actually a completely accidental instance of this. The role was originally conceived with Jack Cassidy in mind, but he turned it down. Cassidy did, however, appear in an early episode as Ted's equally egocentric brother, Hal.
• Directed by Cast Member: Moore herself helmed the season 5 episode "A Boy's Best Friend".
  • Nancy Walker, who played Rhoda's mom Ida, directed two episodes and would go on to direct spinoff Rhoda as well.
• Executive Meddling: A common plot in-universe, as the station managers at WJM mess with the news show's format or try to make personnel changes. Somewhat subverted in that Ted's news show is so bad that the executives may have a point in wanting to change it.
  Mary: [to Lou, after watching Ted on the news] That's the format you're so anxious to hang on to?
• I Am Not Spock: Ted Knight hated the problems people had separating him from Ted Baxter. He had a hard time after the series as well.
• Life Imitates Art:
  • In "The Lars Affair", Lou gets the idea to have a cameraman ride along in a police car to film an on-the-spot arrest, predating COPS by about 15 years.
  • In "Son of 'But Seriously, Folks'", Wes Callison (Jerry Van Dyke) gets the idea of broadcasting the WJM Six O'Clock News from the newsroom... an idea many later news programs adopted, most notably ABC's World News Now.
• Marathon Running: Nick@Nite's The Mary-thon, a week-long marathon (showing a season's worth of episodes each night) that introduced the series to the cable network's line-up in 1992.
• Playing Against Type: Prior to this show, Gavin MacLeod was best known for "heavy" roles. Between this and The Love Boat, he spent the rest of his life with a much sweeter reputation.
• Reality Subtext: "Murray Can't Lose" is about Murray's frustration at being the only person in the group who hasn't won a Teddy Award. In real life, Gavin MacLeod was the only original cast member who never won an Emmy (he was never even nominated) and he later admitted his disappointment about this.
• Referenced by...: In the St. Elsewhere episode "Close Encounters", the amnesiac mental patient John Doe #6 comes to believe that he is Mary Richards after seeing the series on television. He mistakes Captain Gloria Neal, who is played by Betty White, for the happy homemaker Sue Ann Nivens. Captain Neal explains that he has confused her with someone else. Like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, St. Elsewhere was produced by MTM Enterprises.
• Technology Marches On: Ted once floats the idea of his newscast being broadcast later in the evening, to which Lou Grant replies, "I like it! How about we put you on a half hour after 'The Star-Spangled Banner'?" In the 1970s American TV stations normally went off the air at a set time every night, commonly signing off by playing "The Star-Spangled Banner".^note Back then, the major networks broadcast on VHF signals, which consumed a lot of electricity. This, combined with the low viewership during those hours, made the networks decide that broadcasting during the night wasn't financially viable. More economical UHF broadcasting existed back then but couldn't broadcast with as good a picture and as strong a signal as VHF, plus UHF stations had a downtrodden reputation, likely due to association with the infamous failed DuMont Television Network. UHF stations were thus low budget stations that usually broadcast reruns, local access shows and other low-quality programming, something immortalized by "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1989 cult classic comedy film UHF. TV networks broadcasting 24 hours uninterrupted didn't become commonplace until the late 1980s/early 1990s. ^note The first step came in the late 1970s, when Ted Turner proved the commercial viability of broadcasting reruns and old movies with his then-revolutionary TBS "Superstation", which he then linked to a satellite feed to broadcast nationwide, creating what is widely seen as the first cable network. Turner would further prove the viability of 24 hour TV stations with CNN, which launched in 1980 as cable TV was rising in popularity. The next step came in 1984 when the Reagan administration relaxed FCC guidelines on commercial programming, leading to the creation of Infomercials. Now TV stations had the ability to sell off their unused/unwanted airtime, a business practice the Cable networks immediately utilized. Now enter Rupert Murdoch, who launched his Fox Network in 1986 by buying a handful of UHF stations in major media markets. Fox utilized cable to overcome UHF's shortcomings and was thus able to broadcast their network nationwide at an equal picture quality to VHF at a greatly reduced cost, this being just one of the many innovative business practices Murdoch used to turn Fox into a major headache for the Big Three in the 1990s. Fox then took over a number of CBS' VHF affiliates in 1994, forcing CBS onto UHF stations in those markets; CBS then copied Fox's practice of utilizing cable to overcome UHF's signal and picture shortcomings. VHF finally died for good in 2009, when the FCC discontinued analog broadcasting and all networks began broadcasting digitally, which is done using UHF signals. Thus, today all stations are UHF stations.
• Star-Making Role: Pretty much everyone in the cast other than Mary Tyler Moore herself (and perhaps Betty White) can thank this show for first making them a household name.
• Throw It In!: When Moore filmed her famous hat-tossing credits scene in downtown Minneapolis, the camera caught an elderly woman scowling quizzically at her in the background. The woman was a local resident named Hazel Frederick, who'd just happened to be walking down the street while shopping in the area and couldn't understand what this young woman was doing in the middle of a busy intersection. The producers decided the shot was too good not to use, and Frederick's face became an unintentionally iconic part of the show's opening.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Mary was originally going to be divorced, but the writers feared people would think Laura had divorced Rob. Plus, executives back then didn't think a divorcée protagonist would be accepted by the viewing public.
  • Mary Tyler Moore has said that she wanted to do the series for another couple of seasons but the writers and James L. Brooks wanted to end the show when it did.
  • According to Moore, the idea of doing a crossover with The Bob Newhart Show was discussed multiple times but ultimately never materialized.
  • Speaking of Bob Newhart, the role of the lovesick IRS auditor in "1040 or Fight" was written with him in mind, though it wound up going to Paul Sand after Newhart passed on it.
  • At one point, the show nearly got cancelled, and they came up with an alternate finale: a mad bomber would've left bombs all over the city, and it's suspected that the bomber is in the WJM newsroom; as a result, all the main characters start thinking it's one of them. But as it transpires, it was one of the faceless, nameless employees who were always at the back of the newsroom.
  • John Belushi's widow claimed that he was offered a guest spot, but turned it down due to his dislike of television.
• Write Who You Know: Ted Baxter was actually inspired by real life anchorman Jerry Dunphy of CBS Los Angeles O&O KNXT, who later also provided the inspiration for Kent Brockman on James L. Brooks' The Simpsons. Dunphy reportedly didn't take kindly to the parody, referring to Ted Knight as "someone who makes fun of me to all of America each week.” When Knight taped an interview with Dunphy at the height of the show's popularity, Knight defused the tension by convincing Dunphy that he actually based his performance on Dunphy's rival broadcaster, George Putnam. ^note Ironically, however, in real life, Dunphy was actually a very competent, very professional anchorman. In fact, when he anchored KNXT's newscasts, titled The Big News for 6:00 PM newscasts, and 24 Hours for 11:00 PM newscasts, the programs generally attracted a quarter of Los Angeles television owners, ratings unheard of in the market. Indeed, Dunphy was so professional and so popular, that when KNXT unceremoniously fired him in 1975 in order to reshape their newscasts to contain a faster-paced, Eyewitness News type format, their ratings crashed to last place and have remained in last place to this very day. In addition, to add insult to injury, immediately after KNXT fired him, rival station KABC immediately hired him to be their chief anchorman, causing their news ratings to skyrocket to #1 in the process. Dunphy was also well loved behind the scenes as well. Near the end of his career, he was anchoring the main news for independent station KCAL, when he died of a heart attack on his way to work on May 20, 2002. On that day's 9:00 PM newscast, KCAL co-anchor Pat Harvey, fighting back tears, announced his death: "Los Angeles has forever changed tonight, because Jerry Dunphy will never come into your home again. Our beloved anchorman and friend has died. Jerry touched the lives of generations of Angelenos for more than 40 years; a beacon of truth and trust, and for all to turn to in good times and in bad."
• You Look Familiar:
  • Linda Kelsey, who appears in one episode as an ambitious woman attempting to steal Sue Anne's job, would go on to play Star Reporter Billie Newman on the show's Spin-Off Lou Grant.
  • Valerie Harper's husband Richard Schaal was on the show several times as different characters. He played Howard Arnell, Howard's brother Paul, Chuckles the Clown, and a bar patron named Dino. He would then appear on spinoff Rhoda playing Joe's friend Charlie and star on the spinoff Phyllis as Phyllis's co-worker Leo.

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