TL;DR: I knew very little about Mary Tyler Moore and wasn't a big fan and this documentary is a must see.
The Mary Tyler Moore documentary on HBO is compelling and fascinating. I knew almost nothing about her personally.
The only real roles I knew her for were the mom in Ordinary People and Flirting With Disaster. I was a marginal Dick Van Dyke Show fan and never watched the Mary Tyler Moore show.
Given the roles I knew her for which were either a quite flawed, unwilling to change or an over the top at times inappropriate mom I hadn’t really connected with her as a major TV star.
The documentary is held together by a couple of incredible interviews with her and Rona Barrett, Dinah Shore, David Letterman (his daytime show) and others. It also includes a number of interviews, most of which you don’t see the person, friends, family members, etc.
She was an entertainment vanguard.
She was super progressive in her shows for the time. For example, she was the first woman on TV who wore pants instead of those god-awful dresses I’d see women doing chores in.
She also was a comedic actor trailblazer. It’s described exquisitely how she achieved it.
More impactful was that the Mary Tyler Moore shore was groundbreaking as it was supposed to be the first show with a divorced woman as the main role. CBS scrapped the idea as unacceptable (incredible factoid).
She played the role out as a single woman in Minneapolis and a working, career-oriented woman.
Not surprisingly given that, the writers included the first woman who ever wrote on a national broadcast sitcom. Unbelievably the creator was James L. Brooks (yes THAT one from the Simpsons).
It was fascinating to see how it played out that she was an advocate of women’s rights. She and her team pushed the envelope and yet it tells a story where Gloria Steinem said it wasn’t enough.
She was a kind of America’s sweetheart. It was fascinating to see how she ended up with two incredible casts with spectacular writing rooms.
And yet the doc also tells the stories of how she handled rejection and difficulty. So much so she almost didn’t take on the Dick Van Dyke show.
The show really took off when it moved into how she moved to New York and took on new roles and personas that were so different. I LOVED her in Ordinary People (one of my top 5 movies of all time).
I couldn’t understand how she could step so deeply into that role and become this person who I somehow both despised and felt sorry for.
I learned that her family life was full of misunderstanding, difficulty, alcoholism and tragedy. I thought the documentary emphasized this at the perfect time with the perfect weight. It didn’t feel overwhelming and it set the perfect context.
It reminded me of those pictures that used to look like a bunch of random colors and shapes until you looked through it or at it slightly differently and suddenly a rocket ship would appear.
It opened my eyes to who she really was. It’s like her whole career and personal life were the whole story. She loved dancing as a child, it was her first passion.
Towards the end of the doc she says something like “I consider myself a failed dancer and a successful actress.”
During all those interviews there’s this somewhat frenetic energy that seems to protect some core part of herself.
The documentary does an incredible job of illuminating that core part of herself. She was a multi-dimensional, quite wounded woman.
It’s so profound to see the parallel between her doing the “everything looks dreamy” type roles while her insides had a lot of turmoil and her role Ordinary People (a movie about that subject on a familial level).
Not surprisingly, there are some serious tear jerker scenes in the documentary.
The most poignant is a scene in the Mary Tyler Moore Show with the actor who plays her father. Mary had a challenging relationship with her father (her parents are touched on somewhat mostly by reference).
I won’t spoil it. I will tell you that the poignant dynamic of unsaid things finally really said is emotional writing at the very highest level.
I didn’t know that she lost her son to a what they describe as a gun accident, it’s heartbreaking. It was another reminder that when a parent loses a child I think in almost every case a piece of that parent is lost. It’s as if a slice of the soul lifts out of their body.
The final scenes of the movie include a stunning list of women actors who credit their emergence and success partly or substantially to Mary Tyler Moore. It's really moving.
After watching it, I’m not a bigger fan of hers. I don’t feel compelled to watch either TV series. I do feel slightly compelled to watch Ordinary People again.
This movie is a perfect piece of art that demonstrates stories well told make the resonance, interest or even fandom of the subject secondary.
For me the documentary became a human interest story and a powerful reminder of how our stories matter if we only ask about them.
Mary Tyler Moore's story is somehow fun, sad, moving, hopeful and connecting. I would never have thought it could be.
#marytylermoore #BeingMaryTylerMoore