In 2025, I watched all of The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-65) and its spiritual successor The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), with a chaser of Rhoda (1974-78). That’s such a concentrated burst of greatness that I feel like anything I watch this year will be a disappointment.
So while I scrabble around for something to replace the giant hole in my life – and no, spin-off Phyllis (1975-77) doesn’t quite cut it – I can at least throw myself into the usual behind-the-scenes books and documentaries. Very quickly, you learn all the standard tales which have come up over the years. And with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, one tale looms above all: the disastrous preliminary filming of the opening episode, three days before the real one.
This is probably most succinctly expressed in the book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted (Simon & Schuster, 2013):
“The day of The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s first chance to perform in front of a studio audience began with news of a bomb threat on the lot… The threat was determined to be unfounded, and audience members were herded in. But the folks in the stands couldn’t see the actors over the cameras, which were twice as bulky as the standard kind, so they were forced to try to catch the action on small monitors instead. The air-conditioning broke down, so the two-hundred-member audience and the actors were left to swelter in 90-degree July temperatures while watching a practice run of a series already being promoted to viewers as if it were a done deal. The microphones didn’t work properly.”
The problems continue from there. At times, the stories about this recording take on an almost absurd tinge; everything that could have gone wrong, seemingly did. Showrunners James L. Brooks and Allan Burns did a dreadful job with the warm-up; the actors weren’t quite ready; the director hadn’t had enough time with the camera crew… the excuses just keep piling up. The dodgy aircon and sound system would surely be enough to kill a recording, let alone anything else.
And then there was Rhoda, a character which seemingly made a few people nervous. To be fair, she is set up initially as an antagonist to Mary, and spends the entire episode trying to nab her apartment. But also: never underestimate some people’s unpleasant reactions to a gobby Jewish woman.
Either way, she certainly didn’t test well with the studio audience that particular night. What to do? Back to Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted:
“Script supervisor Marge Mullen, who’d held the same job at The Dick Van Dyke Show, stopped by the producers’ office. She had an idea – maybe not the biggest one, but it was something. “People don’t seem to like Rhoda,” they remember her saying. “There’s this little girl who’s Phyllis’s daughter, and if the little girl likes Rhoda, it’ll give the audience the opportunity to love her, too.”
It was the only substantive idea for an improvement Brooks and Burns had heard all evening. They decided to take Mullen’s suggestion, cut a few other lines, and call it a night, putting their faith in what they’d written and the cast they’d hired. Many things had gone wrong with that first taping, but the words and the talent, they believed, were there.”
Come the second recording, three days later?
“The only major change to the script was pigtailed twelve-year-old Lisa Gerritsen as Phyllis’s daughter, Bess, saying, “Aunt Rhoda’s really a lot of fun,” as Mary opened the curtains in her new apartment to see a harried Rhoda on her balcony in the opening scene. Gerritsen was the granddaughter of child actor and later screenwriter True Eames Boardman, as well as the great-granddaughter of silent film actors, but she had now made her own showbiz history.
This time, the audience roared. Gerritsen’s new line seemed to indeed be the magic bullet.”
Unlike all the other problems with the first recording, which was a smorgasbord of failure, this at least is a nice, neat anecdote. One single line changed how the audience felt about Rhoda, Marge Mullen and Lisa Gerritsen save the day, job done.
The problem is, it’s not quite the full story.
