Although it may seem hard to believe now some 50 years later, during its very first performance,The Mary Tyler Moore Showwas nowhere near as beloved as it would become. According topop culture lore, the studio audience at the original pilot taping immediately hatedRhoda(Valerie Harper)and didn’t take kindly to seeing their once cherishedLaura Petrienow as a single career woman flying solo. But time, feminism, and lovable character-driven antics eventually wore viewers down, and by the mid-1970s, millions of people were tuning in each week.
Many schools of thought exist on which episodes ofMary Tyler Mooreare the best, but here I’ve outlined the definitive list of the 10 most essential episodes of the series that, aside from maybe the fashion, some social norms, and the use of rotary phones, could easily air unedited today.
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“Love is All Around” (Season 1, Episode 1)
It’s perhaps easy to see why that very first studio audience hated Rhoda so much in the pilot since she’s really not all that likable. But that’s okay for now because she’s really not the point here. Arriving in Minneapolis after a breakup to interview for a receptionist job at the local WJM news station, Mary Richards is suddenly offered the role of associate producer. No one really sees it coming, not Mary and certainly not her new boss,Lou Grant (Ed Asner), who gracelessly tells her, “You know what? You’ve got spunk. Ihatespunk!” She nonetheless gets the gig just in time for her ex-boyfriend to reappear wanting to make amends. After Mary turns him down, he tells her to take care of herself. “I think I just did,” she replies. All hail Queen Mary of Self-Care, long may she reign.
“Support Your Local Mother” (Season 1, Episode 6)
It’s no surprise that Rhoda would eventually receive her own five-season spin-off, since Valerie Harper’s effortless portrayal and comedic timing made Rhoda a focal point from the very moment she says in her signature sarcastic drone, “Allow me to introduce myself, I’m another person in the room.” But in “Support Your Local Mother,” we quickly meet the side of Rhoda she likes to keep hidden: her mother, Ida (Nancy Walker). Refusing to even see her mother when she comes to town because she knows they’ll just get into an argument, Ida ends up staying downstairs with Mary, who dutifully tries to mend fences between mother and daughter.
By 21st century standards, it’s rare that a series would introduce such a crucial dynamic for a side character so early on (I mean, at leastShonda Rhimeswaited 9 episodes before introducing Addison Montgomery), so much so that this episode had been originally slated to air as Episode 2 of the first season. CBS executives once again failed to see the humor in mother-daughter foibles and initially forbade the series from even filming “Support Your Local Mother,” but it’s a good thing they went forward with it anyway - since the episode won an Emmy for the writers and brought a nomination for directing. I’m willing to bet CBS saw the humor within Rhoda and Ida’s relationship soon thereafter.
“Second Story Story” (Season 1, Episode 18)
In this underrated Season 1 episode, Mary finds her apartment broken into - twice. There’s nothing quite special about “Second Story Story” from neither an aesthetic nor creative point of view, but Moore gives quite a convincing performance from a week in the life of a young person who’s had every possible thing go wrong. The story obviously worked, since it would not be the first time that writers played upon the humor in those days when absolutely nothing is going your way. AsAlanis Morissetteonce put it; “Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything’s okay.” And no one knows this better than Mary Richards.
“Some of My Best Friends Are Rhoda” (Season 2, Episode 23)
We all have a friend like Rhoda—maybe she’s high maintenance and gets on your nerves sometimes, maybe she overreacts and says things she doesn’t mean, but you always know you’ll kiss and make up in the end. (Maybe youarethe Rhoda. I know I certainly am.) In this poignant portrayal of the pitfalls of friendship in adulthood, Mary inadvertently makes a new friend when she gets rear-ended one day by a beautiful blonde, Joanne, with whom she suddenly finds herself entangled. But before Mary starts to consider the possibility of a long-term new friendship, she realizes that the reason Joanne repeatedly snubs Rhoda and won’t let her join them to play tennis at her country club is because Rhoda is Jewish. Although Rhoda is not present for this revelation, Mary sticks up for her friend in the way that you’d hope all your friends would stick up for you - especially when discrimination is involved.
“The Good Time News” (Season 3, Episode 1)
In one of the most famous episodes of the series,The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s third season premiere finds Mary discovering that the man who held her job before her made $50 a week more than she makes. And Lou wastes no time in pointing out the obvious, it’s because he was a man with a family to feed, and Mary is a single, childless woman. She ends up getting a raise in the end on principle, and while “The Good Time News” was not without controversy at the time (specifically fromGloria Steinem, who would later say, “Mary Tyler Moore agitated for equal pay and got half of what she asked for; it was a very pop cultural compromise”), it marked the beginning of an era for the series where Mary was starting to become no longer afraid to stand up for herself and those around her.
We’d always known she was that girl deep down, but she needed to get there in her own time. As Moore put it toEntertainment Weeklyin 1994, “[Mary] was a woman who stood up for herself whenever she spotted any inequity, but who wasn’t going to push it to the edge. She made little squeaks and noises and was among the first to do so.”
“My Brother’s Keeper” (Season 3, Episode 17)
Inarguably one of the best-written episodes ofMary Tyler Moorefinds Phyllis (Cloris Leachman) attempting to set up Mary with her brother, Ben (Robert Moore). But to Phyllis’ shock and horror, it’s with Rhoda whom Ben appears to hit it off, causing a downward spiral for the notoriously uptight landlady considering what it would be like to have to welcome Rhoda, with whom she’s never quite got on, into her family.
When Rhoda tries to assure Phyllis that there’s nothing to worry about because Ben isn’t her type, Phyllis is immediately insulted. “He’s witty! He’s attractive! He’s successful! He’s single!” she yells. “He’s gay!” adds Rhoda without skipping a beat, one of the first times “gay” was used as an identifier for a man on American network television. And while it would have been very easy to make the suspected gay character the punchline of every joke as popular culture would continue to do for decades to come, “My Brother’s Keeper” does the very opposite by making the joke on Phyllis, not Ben. It’s definitely not much by today’s standards but was leaps and bounds ahead of its time for 1973.
“The Lars Affair” (Season 4, Episode 1)
The fourth season premiere, famously otherwise known as the first appearance of the Happy Homemaker herself, Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White). In “The Lars Affair,” Phyllis suspects that her never-seen dermatologist husband, Lars, is having an affair. It doesn’t take long for the culprit to be outed as Sue Ann, a local television personality who hosts a daytime show for WJM featuring housewifery tips. The female character with the largest personality on the series was arguably previously held by Phyllis, so to see her face off with the shameless, man-hungry Sue Ann predated every feud onDesperate Housewivesby about four decades.
The episode also seamlessly established White as the best thing that could have happened toThe Mary Tyler Moore Showby that time, considering that Rhoda and Phyllis would both disappear to their own spin-offs in a few years' time. She wasn’t always the most morally sound, but no one can ever say that Sue Ann Nivens didn’t know how to get what she wanted.
“The Dinner Party” (Season 4, Episode 10)
Have you ever heard of Mary Richards’ dinner parties? That’s because just about every single one manages to turn into a disaster, and “The Dinner Party” is no exception to that rule. When Mary decides to hold a dinner for Congresswoman Geddes (Irene Tedrow), she knows she needs to break her streak of bad luck in this department. So she enlists the help of Sue Ann to make dinner, but things go predictably awry when she assumes creative control but still manages to blame it all on Mary. (She said dinner would be ready in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, Mary, what are you not understanding?!)
To make matters worse, Ted (Ted Knight) shows up in a depressed state of woe, Lou helps himself to far too many servings of the only course, and Rhoda arrives with a date, played by a pre-FonzieHenry Winkler, who has no place to sit and also depresses the crowd with the tale of how he just got fired. Try as she might, every one of Mary’s dinner parties is a bust. But does she ever give up? She probably should.
“Will Mary Richards Go to Jail?” (Season 5, Episode 1)
Mary is under fire for refusing to reveal her source on a high-profile news story, and before long, the situation ends her up in jail where she befriends two chatty sex workers. With Rhoda gone and Phyllis only appearing a few times in Season 5 before also departing, the series had entered a bit of a decline before ultimately finding its groove again in Seasons 6 and 7.
On paper, the fifth season premiere seems like an outlandish plot written merely to elicit laughs at the thought of Mary Richards landing herself in jail, similar to the comedic style ofLaverne & Shirley. But what the episode does best is showcase Mary standing her ground and fighting for her own journalistic integrity, something that first season Mary Richards would surely not have had the confidence to do. Better yet, portraying the character as someone who can make friends with people from all walks of life, even those you meet in prison, proves that she really can turn the world on with her smile.
“Chuckles Bites the Dust” (Season 6, Episode 7)
No list of the best episodes ofThe Mary Tyler Moore Showwould be complete without mentioning “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” universally acknowledged umpteen times over as the single best episode of the series:TV Guideonce placed it at Number 1 on its list of the 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time in 1997. The episode finds the WJM crew mourning the loss of Chuckles the Clown, who was killed during a parade when a rogue elephant tried to shell him like a peanut. To Mary’s absolute horror, Lou, Sue Ann, and Murray (Gavin MacLeod) are quick to make jokes and snicker at the circumstances that led to Chuckles’ death, believing them to be wildly insensitive and inappropriate for a workplace mourning the death of a colleague.
But when the time for Chuckles’ funeral rolls around, it’s Mary who bursts into uncontrollable laughter listening to the man’s eulogy, which recites many of the clown’s comedic routines. Her friends are appalled at her reaction, but the minister insists she stand and that laughter is what Chuckles lived for, so she may go ahead and laugh. It’s then that the Mary we all know and love returns, as she now bursts into uncontrollable tears. AsSplitsiderput it in 2012, the episode “found a way to even make death funny, and that’s what makes it one of the most human — not to mention hilarious — episodes ever.”
