[TMC]

http://thiswastv.com/2012/06/26/1970...l-show-part-1/

For the premise, Randall wanted to play someone as different from Felix Unger as possible: a football coach, he suggested, or a minister. Patchett and Tarses naturally wanted to write for Randall’s established persona, and pushed for him to be something suitably stuffy, like a lawyer. Tinker came up with the idea they finally used: Randall would play a judge. (“Randall was first worried that this would make him too passive,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “but finally was persuaded that there were all sorts of judges.”) The character they developed would be more authoritative and with-it than Felix, less stuffy and better able to snark at his friends and employees—a character not unlike Bob Newhart’s Dr. Bob Hartley, but with lines tailored for a star who spoke more floridly and theatrically than Newhart.

But though the show got good reviews and respectable ratings, it had two fundamental problems. One, which Tinker eventually copped to when speaking to TV Guide, was that the MTM “two lives” formula led to a show where one half was much stronger than the other. “We probably should have stayed in the courthouse more and not gone home with him so much,” Tinker admitted. “That deflated the show, slowed it down.” The standout stories usually focused on Walter Franklin’s life as a judge. That was where Miss Reubner was, and with McLerie’s mix of bite and vulnerability—younger and more attractive than the character Patchett and Tarses had in mind, she became that rare thing, a mean sitcom character with genuinely touching subtext—she gave one of the outstanding TV performances of the era. That was where Mario Lanza was; that was where the instantly lovable Barney Martin was, even though his character rarely had a lot to do (he mainly existed to provide exposition). That was where guest characters could walk in, à la Barney Miller, and steal the show: “The DeNecki Debacle” is a showcase for character actor Stephen Elliott as the ultimate obstructionist lawyer, and Gary David Goldberg wrote “Mario Strikes Again,” a showcase for all the ways Mario could get on Randall’s nerves in court.

Then Randall went home, and to what? To his nice, level-headed teenage daughter, played by George C. Scott’s not notably talented daughter Devon; to his nice, basically polite son; to Roberts’s wisecracking servant, an under-written character played by an actress who was too good for the material she was getting. Most workplace/home hybrid sitcoms do tend to be stronger at work; The Bob Newhart Show was, and Mary Tyler Moore was, and of course Barney Miller dumped the home stuff a few episodes into its first season. The Dick Van Dyke Show is one of the few shows that was equally at home in those two worlds. But on Tony Randall, the imbalance was so strong that it unbalanced the whole show—and probably made it less compatible with Barney Miller than it would have been as a pure courtroom comedy.

The other problem the show had, though, was symptomatic of the problems that were starting to erode MTM’s supremacy in comedy. That MTM classiness and taste was starting to work against it, creating a sense that—except for Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart—its shows weren’t quite as funny as they should have been. As an MTM production, The Tony Randall Show had little slapstick, few sexual jokes, few topical jokes, few cheap jokes. It didn’t recycle standard sitcom plots the way Garry Marshall did for Randall on The Odd Couple. And it wasn’t as funny as The Odd Couple, or for that matter Three’s Company or Happy Days or the ABC hits, because the plots were so low-key and simple that there simply wasn’t much hilarity to be gotten out of them. Walter proposes to his girlfriend and she says yes, but then she changes her mind; Walter’s kids rebel against his authority and stage a mock trial against his tyranny, where he solves everything by pointing out that he’s really a good father who has their best interest at heart; Walter gets an offer to go back into private practice, but after thinking it over, decides to remain a judge.