Allan Burns on Clashing with CBS over "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"

[JamesG]

"Mary Tyler Moore Show" Producer Allan Burns on Clashing with the Network
8/24/14
by THR Staff


Allan Burns appeared alongside fellow producers Carl Reiner and Norman Lear for THR's Emmy Producer's photoshoot. He said that CBS hated "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", which originally featured the protagonist as divorced.

"CBS absolutely hated the script. First of all we had her divorced, that was part of our original concept. They hated it and said, 'People will think that she divorced Dick Van Dyke,' and I said 'No, they wont!'

I mean they hated it, so we wrote 6 more scripts and they hated every one of them. It was just awful."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/liv...y-tyler-727207