We all love The Mary Tyler Moore Show, don't we? Of course, we do. Well, I'm going to be a grouch here and make two tiny criticisms of this usually-sacred endeavor. The first, actually, is about the gala reunion special that ran last Monday evening. I'm afraid I heard a bit too much about "we were a family," as if it's a singular sensation for the cast of a successful show to care about one another. Though there are exceptions, it's more the rule than not. I've even worked on unsuccessful shows where everyone bonded and remained close. (On a hit show, everyone bonds because they're together for so long and growing wealthy together. On a flop, people often bond because they're going through a war together.) I mean, I'm glad that Mary loves Ed and Ed loves Mary and that they both love Gavin and Gavin, on-camera and off, has always loved Mary, etc.
But I think I've gotten a little tired of seeing these people hug. Moreover, in loyalty to my vocation, I'd have liked to have seen a little more attention paid to the people who wrote that show, too. Weren't they a part of the "family?"
My second gripe may seem trivial, especially now. But on a website like this, you write about what's on your mind and every time I catch a rerun of that series, it strikes me as unrealistic that everyone in the cast has so much affection for Ted Baxter. He really was a moron at times and I keep waiting for the episode where one of them smacks him in the mouth. Or tells him, "Ted, you just did something enormously rude and inconsiderate to the people around you." I once mentioned this to Lorenzo Music, who worked on the series, and he said, "I think everyone may have confused Ted Baxter with Ted Knight, whom we loved." (I worked once with Ted Knight and I think he may have gotten a bit confused that way, himself.)
The inconsistency I'm pointing up here was best illustrated in an episode that is rerunning this Saturday on TV Land. Here's the official précis…
Ted's Moment of Glory
Ted auditions to host a game show in New York. The WJM-TV News staff doesn't take him seriously until he gets the job and they realize that their pompous anchorman is really going to leave.
If you remember that episode, you'll remember that, in the end, Lou Grant talks Ted out of taking the big salary game show job. He tells him he's part of a noble profession: "You're a newsman, Ted. You don't want to be a quizzzzmaster." And the happy ending is that Ted decides not to leave WJM.
Well, I don't buy it. I don't buy that Ted would stay. I don't buy that Lou Grant would want him to stay. I don't buy that it was in anyone's best interests for him to stay. Lou is an old-line news guy who takes the craft seriously. For years, he's been saddled with a cluck for an anchorman and while he's initially thrilled to have the opportunity to bring in someone who knows what he's reading, he somehow decides he'll miss Ted Baxter and must talk him out of leaving. And, like I said, I don't buy it.
Ted Baxter, as depicted on the series, should have been a quizzzzmaster. He never showed the slightest aptitude for news broadcasting, nor any real desire to learn it. All he wanted was fame and money, and the WJM job meant a lot less of both…and not even any real security. Being the laughingstock anchorman at the lowest-rated local news outlet in the city? How long could that reasonably be expected to last? Yes, I know, in the last episode everyone but Ted was fired, but that was the joke; that all the people who shouldn't have been fired were and the admitted incompetent wasn't. At any given moment before that, Ted Baxter was lucky to have any career, much less one that gave him the cash and attention he so dearly loved.
None of that makes him evil. Just makes him something of a jerk, which was fine. He did a lot of jerky things. But in a show where the human interaction was otherwise so honest and indicative of how real people act, the fact that Ted "Good Night and Good Newt" Baxter was loved and easily forgiven his jerkiness still seems an anomaly to me. And it seems so wrong that, in that episode, Lou Grant talks him out of fame and fortune. (He may also have talked him out of something almost as good. The game show Ted is to host has Dian Parkinson as its model. This is the lady who was then working The Price is Right and banging Bob Barker between Plinko games…)
Anyway, that episode reruns Saturday, like I said. Just in case you want to watch and see if it seems to you as wrong as it seems to me.