By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times –
LOS ANGELES — In recent months the name Mary Tyler Moore has been bandied about with unexpected regularity bordering on reckless abandon. This is not just because she recently made her first TV appearance in many moons on pal Betty White’s show “Hot in Cleveland” or because she proved at last month’s televised fete for White’s 90th birthday that she can still rock a white pantsuit or even because she is receiving this year’s Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award on Sunday.
(PHOTO: Mary Tyler Moore pioneered the female-led comedy format in the 1970s and sitcoms are still being compared to her show today. She is shown in 2006 in Los Angeles, California.)
Instead, Moore’s name keeps coming up because 42 years after she helped create the single-gal comedy genre, a slew of female-centric shows hit the networks, raising hopes that a new version of the classic and still-resonant “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” would emerge. (It hasn’t.)
By midseason, critics were blatantly holding up the new to the old. “No Mary Richards” was how several chose to characterize the fictionalized version of comedian Chelsea Handler in her new show, “Are You There, Chelsea?” Well, no, obviously not, since Mary was a well-dressed, carefully coiffed professional woman trying to balance a career and a meaningful personal life and Chelsea’s show is centered on a bartender / drunken skank.
If anyone involved hopes Moore herself is watching, I’m here to tell you that’s she’s not. “Oh, I don’t watch any of them,” she said recently from her office in New York. “Why would I? That story has been done, and I think we did it pretty well. I don’t need to watch another version.”
Perhaps to see the new gals break a few taboos?
“Taboos?” she asks with a laugh. “There aren’t any taboos anymore.”
It’s difficult to argue with her when “2 Broke Girls’” Max (Kat Dennings), the character who may come closest to Mary Richards (she is hard-working, talented and yet insecure), insists on saying “vagina” so often one assumes there is a special bell that rings in the writers room every time she does. And who wants to argue with Mary Tyler Moore, who at 75 has broken more ground than Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso?
She may have been surprised with the Life Achievement Award — when SAG President Ken Howard called, she says, “I thought he was going to ask if I would present something to someone” — but it’s difficult to imagine anyone else was.
Between “The Dick Van Dyke Show’s” Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, Moore helped create two of television’s most influential and indelible roles — there’s a statue depicting the famous Mary hat toss in downtown Minneapolis. How many other television characters have their own statue?
With her then-husband Grant Tinker, she formed MTM Enterprises, which produced equally influential and successful shows including “Rhoda,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Hill Street Blues.” Following a career path almost unheard of in the U.S. at the time, she went on to win accolades for her work in film (including an Oscar nod for “Ordinary People”) and stage (where she was the first female lead in “Whose Life Is It Anyway?”)
She also managed to write two memoirs that raised the bar for celebrity frankness — in “After All,” she detailed the struggles in her marriages, her battle with alcoholism and the tragic death of her son (he accidentally shot himself); in “Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes,” she launched a public conversation about juvenile diabetes, a cause she has supported for most of her career.
“I hate the word ‘memoir,’” she says of her books. “I just thought of it as the story of my life.”
For the record, she also hates when people come up to her to ask how she’s feeling, which she says they do with alarming frequency. Yes, she recently had surgery to remove a tumor from the lining of her brain before it became a problem, and yes, she adds, she did just break her arm after tripping over one of her four dogs. But she’s feeling just fine, thanks.
In fact, she’s feeling honored by all the attention and in particular the SAG award. “I am trying not to think of it,” she says, “and if I do, I think of it as a reward for having done something good, which is more important than me or even the roles I had.”
