 
|
||||
              
|
Monday, January 19, 1998 By Brian O'Neill
Imagine this. Twenty-five years ago you had a good friend, one so warm and true that other people loved, absolutely loved, seeing the two of you together.
You went your separate ways.
Now all these fancy suits in New York and Hollywood wave money in your face just so the two of you will get together again. Once a week. And you're not even real.
This is what I thought when I read that, next fall, ABC will reunite Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern, those 1970s icons from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
Don't get me wrong. I loved the show. I grew up watching reruns of "The Dick Van Dyke Show," starring Moore as Laura Petrie. As I've confessed before, when she danced around her suburban living room in those capri pants, I felt urges I didn't yet understand, even as I made silent thanks that my Mom never felt compelled to do The Twist.
So when Moore became Mary Richards, while I was in my teens, I rooted for her from the get-go. Loved her newsroom gang right from the start, too: Rhoda, Ted Baxter, Murray Slaughter and, especially, Lou Grant. One of the first columns I ever banged out in Pittsburgh was when Ed "Lou Grant" Asner came to the Rainbow Kitchen in Homestead, and I asked him how Mr. Grant would want the story covered.
The story wasn't Asner, I was told in that gruff, aged-whisky voice that charmed millions. The story was in the volunteers. What motivated them?
He meant the volunteers who were helping the hungry, but Mr. Grant might have said the same thing about the volunteers hungry for nostalgia, the ones ABC expects to welcome Rhoda and Mary. What's our motivation? And aren't we in for a letdown?
Think about it. Think about your closest friends from the mid-1970s. (We'll excuse those readers who have to go back to the sandbox.)
Some of us, if we're lucky, are still tight with friends from decades past, but in this mobile society, the odds of that are increasingly slim. That's one reason "Nick at Nite" reruns are so popular; two-dimensional old buddies are the only ones we can get in our living rooms.
The people we met outside the idiot box, back in the days when leisure suits were considered hip, aren't so dependable. Best friends from high school or college or old jobs or old neighborhoods somehow evolve into just another address on the Christmas card list, if that. And, on the rare day we run into them, we know five minutes into the conversation that we've already lived our best episodes.
Take my little sister. At 23, she moved to Philadelphia to start a new job, and she still has this photo her best friend took of her throwing a wool hat aloft at a Center City intersection, just as Mary did at the opening of every show.
I called Sis, now the mother of two in the Jersey suburbs, to ask about the girl who snapped her picture. Did she ever see her?
"I saw her like two years ago for lunch," she told me, as her 3-year-old daughter wailed behind her. "It was fine, but you know we had kids. Try to have lunch with four kids running around. I'd love to see her again, but she lives out on Long Island . . . "
This is why ABC knows we'll tune into "Mary and Rhoda Yell At Their Tattooed, Pierced-Nosed Brats," or whatever it's called. It won't be the same as it was back in the day, but it will remind viewers of better times, and it could be worse.
ABC is also contemplating an update of "Fantasy Island." Yikes. I'd sooner meet my friends on Devil's Island. Providing it has cable.
|
|||
