Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 21 November

Being Mary Tyler Moore (Adolphus, 2023)

Whenever I feel like a low impact pick-me-up, I will often look for a good celebrity bio­graphy. They have to be good, mind you, and some doc­u­ment­ar­ies or doc­u­ment­ary series that are find­ing their way to Netflix do not mer­it that description.

Find your­self some­thing that played a recent film fest­iv­al or is on DocPlay or has the HBO logo on the front and you won’t go far wrong.

Being Mary Tyler Moore is in the HBO cat­egory and is one of the most sat­is­fy­ing doc­u­ment­ar­ies I’ve seen in a while, des­pite – or per­haps because – I didn’t know too much about the star before going in.

Indeed, I don’t recall ever see­ing The Mary Tyler Moore Show reg­u­larly – I was in the WKRP in Cincinnati gen­er­a­tion – but when dir­ect­or James Adolphus wisely uses the entire “Love Is All Around” open­ing cred­its to the show I found myself tear­ing up.

That’s not just the power of nos­tal­gia, it’s an all-time great song, but it’s also great storytelling because it appears at a moment when Mary is at a low ebb, recov­er­ing from a failed Broadway exper­i­ment and a series of ter­rible Hollywood films. She needed to be reminded that love was all around, too.

Returning to situ­ation com­edy would make her the biggest female star on tele­vi­sion for sev­en hugely suc­cess­ful sea­sons and the most influ­en­tial woman on American screens in the 1970s.

The doc­u­ment­ary tells the career story – des­pite all that acclaim she says she always felt like failed dan­cer rather than a suc­cess­ful act­or – but it’s when it gets into the con­tra­dic­tions of her per­son­al life that it becomes really insightful.

She achieved her greatest fame play­ing a single career girl but in her own life she had been mar­ried and a moth­er since she was 18-years-old. Her greatest asset was that smile but co-workers often talk about her as being aloof and dis­tant when off-camera. She was fiercely loy­al, as so many con­trib­ut­ors testi­fy, but not very easy to get to know.

And then there’s the tra­gedies of her life – no one really escapes these things, I know, but it’s still a shock when they occur, life hav­ing a way of knock­ing you down a peg or two when you think you’ve made it.

It’s not a talk­ing heads doc­u­ment­ary. The con­tri­bu­tions from friends and admirers are via voi­ceover and the visu­als bene­fit from access to her con­sid­er­able fam­ily archives.

The film is also a remind­er of a time when cul­ture was shared by us all. Millions of people tuned in to The Mary Tyler Moore Show every Saturday night but they also stuck around for All in the Family, Newhart, M*A*S*H and Carol Burnett. It was ano­dyne, true, but it provided con­nect­ive tis­sue for a soci­ety that was in danger of splintering. 

Final thought:The Mary Tyler Moore Show is avail­able on DVD here in Aotearoa but not avail­able on any loc­al stream­er? There’s so much vin­tage and clas­sic tele­vi­sion that is miss­ing in action online, even though they are avail­able over­seas. I feel an invest­ig­a­tion com­ing along.

Where to find Being Mary Tyler Moore

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Not avail­able yet in Aus, I’m afraid

USA: Streaming on Max

UK: Streaming on NowTV

Further reading

At RNZ I’ve just pos­ted an appre­ci­ation for the ter­rif­ic Prime Video com­edy Upload, the latest sea­son of which we just finished.