STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Americans said goodbye yesterday to Mary Tyler Moore, who died yesterday at the age of 80. She won seven Emmy Awards for her work on TV, but that number doesn't quite describe her place in the culture. She played characters to whom many women especially related and admired. Here's our pop culture correspondent Linda Holmes.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE IS ALL AROUND")
SONNY CURTIS: (Singing) Who can turn the world on with her smile?
LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: Mary Tyler Moore wasn't just beloved, she was the kind of beloved where they build you a statue. Moore's is in Minneapolis, where her best known character Mary Richards of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" worked for the fictional television station WJM. She'd already won two Emmys playing Laura Petrie on "The Dick Van Dyke Show," but Moore cemented her icon status when Mary Richards walked into that job interview, even if she got off to a rough start with Lou Grant, her soon-to-be boss, who kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk.
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EDWARD ASNER: (As Lou Grant) Look, Miss, I was just about to have a drink, and I wouldn't mind some company. Want one?
MARY TYLER MOORE: (As Mary Richards) Oh, no thank you.
ASNER: (As Lou Grant) I said I wouldn't mind some company.
MOORE: (As Mary Richards) Well, all right, I'll have a Brandy Alexander.
(LAUGHTER)
HOLMES: Mary Richards was not TV's first working woman or its first woman on her own. But before Mary, if you saw a woman without a partner at the center of a TV comedy, she was probably a widow like Diahann Carroll's single mom on "Julia" or Lucille Ball on her later show "The Lucy Show." Mary didn't have a living husband, a dead husband, an ex-husband or even a permanent boyfriend like Marlo Thomas did on "That Girl." It wasn't that she didn't want one. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong wrote "Mary And Lou And Rhoda And Ted," a history of the show, and in 2013 she told NPR how Mary stayed single for so long.
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JENNIFER KEISHIN ARMSTRONG: They tried several times. There were dating episodes, and a couple guys lasted more than one episode - very few, but a couple. I mean, it's sort of touching. They were like, no one was good enough for her.
HOLMES: Mary may not have found that exactly right guy, but she did have an apartment, a job, friends and a sex life. In fact, she was on birth control, as the audience learned in November, 1972, when Mary's mother issued a reminder to her father and Mary accidentally answered, too.
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NANETTE FABRAY: (As Dottie Richards) Don't forget to take your pill.
BILL QUINN: (As Walter Richards) I won't.
MOORE: (As Mary Richards) I won't.
(LAUGHTER)
HOLMES: Comedies about single women with all kinds of lives would become staples of both broadcast and cable - "Laverne & Shirley," "Murphy Brown," "Living Single," "Sex And The City," and now "Girls" and "Insecure" - but Mary and her best friend Rhoda were there first. Mary had bad dates before Rachel and Monica on "Friends" did. Mary had to get the show on the air before Liz Lemon on "30 Rock" did, and Mary struggled with a gruff but loving boss before Leslie Knope on "Parks And Recreation" did. I talked with Rachel Bloom, the star and co-creator of The CW's "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend." She told me how watching "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in reruns in the '90s really influenced her.
RACHEL BLOOM: The idea of someone being a funny ingenue, and that she was funny as well as the people around her, and that it was a woman cracking jokes, not just, like, a woman being the straight man for dudes cracking jokes.
HOLMES: Women mattered behind the scenes of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" too, they had roles as writers and directors, and Moore and her then-husband Grant Tinker set up MTM Enterprises to produce the show. You might remember the logo with a mewing cat where the MGM lion would have been, that company produced not just "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Rhoda" and "Lou Grant," but "The Bob Newhart Show," "WKRP In Cincinnati," "Hill Street Blues" and "St. Elsewhere." Minneapolis' Mary Tyler Moore statue was moved indoors in 2015 away from its home on the outdoor Nicollet Mall to make way for construction, but later this year it's scheduled to return, and once again, tourists will copy Mary Tyler Moore's pose and throw their hats in the air. Linda Holmes, NPR News.