It is curious that in France The name of Lou Grant vaguely recalls something and that that of Mary Richards does not mention anything. THE Mary Tyler Moore Show has never been broadcast on our screens, unlike its male spin-off, which we were able to briefly see in the mid-1980s. A shame, when we know the immense television contribution that was the sitcom created in 1970 by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, on order of Mary Tyler Moore and her husband, Grant Tinker, for their production house.
In the pages of Mondeonly a note from Claude Sarraute, published in 1977 and entitled “The Suffragettes of the small screen”, gives an idea of the importance that the series across the Atlantic had. “Curious, this phenomenon we are witnessing in the United States, this true dichotomy (…) Between the large and the small screen. On one, everything is masculine, and on the other – that, we know it less – feminine “writes the journalist. Broadcast for the first time in July 1970, the sitcom and its iconic credits – the heroine throws her beret in the air of joy while Sonny Curtis « you’re gonna make it after all » (“You are going to get there after all”) – Immediately add all women to the household of the previous decade.
The driver of the series, of unprecedented modernity, is a program alone. We meet Mary Richards, 30 and single. Originally, the creators had imagined it as a young divorced, to correspond to the reality of the time – divorces have exploded since the early 1960s -, but CBS has not followed. The young woman has just left New York for Minneapolis (Minnesota), where she won a job as a junior producer in a local news channel. In the same episode, she definitively dismissed her ex-fiancé who came to win back, in a scene that has become famous. ” Take care of yourself “he said before leaving. “I think that’s what I just did”she replied. Mary’s assumed celibacy may sometimes weigh her – she will have her share of sentimental disappointments and will entrust her fatigue after “Twenty years of dating and … 2,000 meetings (…)90 % really rotten! »» -, he will become a guideline of the sitcom, until he had a potential relationship with Lou, his boss to the end of season 7.
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