The Mary Tyler Moore Show: The Complete Seventh Season

The first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show was released on DVD in September of 2002, and now the seventh and final season has been released in October of 2010, which means it took Fox a longer period of time to get the entire series out on DVD than it was actually on the air back in the 70s. Of course, the important thing is that it’s now all out there, thank goodness, but it goes to show how tricky a business this whole TV on DVD thing can be when it takes eight years to get seven seasons of one of the greatest sitcoms ever made onto the silver platter. For comparison purposes, it took Fox a few months shy of five years to get all 11 seasons of M*A*S*H out on DVD, while Anchor Bay released all eight seasons of Three’s Company over a mere three years.

What’s most telling about these facts, perhaps, is that many people have simply forgotten what a great series The Mary Tyler Moore Show really is, as clearly folks weren’t very motivated to go out and support it through dollars, which is something of a mild travesty for a show that took home a whopping 29 Emmys during its run. If there’d been more interest in these DVD releases, it wouldn’t have taken so long, and probably more care would’ve gone into the content of the season box sets (only the first two sets featured bonus material).

The good news is that Mary Richards and the rest of the WJM-TV gang went out on a series of major high notes. I nit-picked the previous two seasons, while still highly recommending them, but the final season of the series is practically faultless. This is the way you do it, TV people: Go out with class, while your show is still great. Don’t wait until all the life has been sucked out of it, and it’s reduced to parody – a pale shadow of the series it once was. This is something the major networks just don’t get. They flog the horse until it’s lifeless. If Steve Carell is leaving The Office, why not just end The Office while it’s still a good show? (You don’t have to answer that because we both know what the answer is…coughmoneycoughcashcowcough.)

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The Mary Tyler Moore Show: The Complete Sixth Season

Any discussion of Season Six of The Mary Tyler Moore Show should probably begin with the episode “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” especially since so many conversations about the show in general start off with that episode as a reference point. It’s been hailed time and again as one of the greatest TV episodes of all time of any series. Once a piece of pop culture attains that sort of status, the only place to go is downhill, and then it’s all a matter of how far it’s going to go.

The premise of “Chuckles” is largely a one-joke affair that builds and builds to a crescendo. Chuckles the Clown, who’s sort of WJM’s version of Bozo, dies at the trunk of an elephant. He was dressed as a giant peanut at the time, you see. These events are of course played off-screen, but they’re described in detail well enough that we get the picture. At first the staff is shocked, but after some time passes, Murray (Gavin MacLeod) cracks a morbid joke, which Lou (Ed Asner) finds to be a scream. Before long, Ted (Ted Knight) and Sue Ann (Betty White) are joining in on the fun, with each offering up one lame gag after another. And the jokes are pretty lame, but the jokes aren’t why the episode is funny. No, the humor here begins with the fact that Mary doesn’t care for their attitudes and takes each of them to task for their insensitivity, which is turn just eggs them on.

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The Mary Tyler Moore Show: The Complete Fifth Season

Just about every piece of criticism I’ve ever read about The Mary Tyler Moore Show (or just plain Mary Tyler Moore, which is the title in the opening credits) goes to great lengths to talk about how it’s one of the greatest sitcoms in TV history. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s not. When you start attaching the label “greatest” to pieces of pop culture, there tend to be expectations involved, and surely that’s the case if the viewer is new to the show. I’ve got a massive amount of unconditional love for Mary Tyler Moore, but I watched this particular set with a more critical eye than I normally would, and tried to be a little bit more objective throughout my viewing.

The truth is that a fair amount of this series is horribly dated by today’s standards. What made the show so groundbreaking at the time – the idea of a career woman making it on her own without the help of a man – today seems awfully quaint and naïve. Further, there’s a great deal of sexism that pops up from time to time. Sometimes, when it’s from anchorman Ted Baxter (Ted Knight), it’s appropriately funny because Baxter is supposed to be a clueless buffoon. Other times, however, it comes from Mary’s boss, Lou Grant (Edward Asner), and it’s these instances that may very well have the power to get under people’s skin. Lou wasn’t like Ted, or even Archie Bunker for that matter: he was an intelligent, decent man, and a good boss, so it becomes all the more obnoxious when Mary is still expected to get him his coffee. In this season, when Mary is promoted to producer, she has to beg Lou to give her more responsibility; in his mind, giving her the title was plenty. Much of the series is probably an accurate reflection of what single career-minded women were going through in the ‘70s, so it’s really important to take all that into context when watching the show.

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