Mary & Rhoda Get Into an Impromptu Love Triangle in “Bob & Rhoda & Teddy & Mary”

[TMC]

https://popculturereferences.com/mar...eddy-and-mary/

Brian look at how an impromptu love triangle leads to trouble with Rhoda and Mary at a local television awards ceremony.



Today, we look at how an impromptu love triangle leads to trouble with Rhoda and Mary at a local television awards ceremony.

This is a delayed Year of Great TV Episodes, where every day from March 2nd on this year (plus January 1st-March 1st of 2024), we’ll take a look at great TV episodes. Note that I’m not talking about “Very Special Episodes” or episodes built around gimmicks, but just “normal” episodes of TV shows that are notable only because of how good they are.

All this month, I’ll be spotlighting great female-centric TV episodes.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show is one of the most acclaimed TV sitcoms of all-time, a show that helped change the face of sitcoms in the 1970 by virtue of being a sitcom that was actually, well, you know, SMART.

It didn’t hurt that the show starred Mary Tyler Moore, one of the most charismatic and popular actors of the era. She plays Mary Richards, a young woman who is reeling from a bad breakup with her fiancée who has to go get a job in Minneapolis. After she fails to get a receptionist job at a TV station, WJM-TV, she instead gets an assistant news producer job at the same station, working under the main producer, Lou Grant (Ed Asner). She befriends the show’s writer, Murray (Gavin MacLeod) and the buffoonish anchor, Ted (Ted Knight).

She rents the floor of a house from a woman named Phyllis (Cloris Leachman), and quickly befriends the other tenant, Rhoda (Valerie Harper).

Picking my first Mary Tyler Moore Show episode was REALLY tricky, because the most famous episodes were all very late in the series (and really play on how much you know ABOUT the characters, really). The other tricky thing is that the best episode of the first season was a Rhoda-centric episode, and, well, no offense to Rhoda, but I’m not doing a Rhoda-centric episode for my spotlight on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

The OTHER best episode is the show’s Christmas episode, and I can’t choose THAT, either.

Another issue is that, especially early on, the show tended to do either work plots or romance plots, and so I picked “Bob and Rhoda and Teddy and Mary,” which nicely merged the two types of plots together.

Written by Bob Rodgers, the episode sees the station submitting their nominations for a local TV award ceremony (the “Teddys”), and Mary, Murray, and Ted all end up getting nominated.

Meanwhile, Rhoda is seeing a new guy, Bob (played by Greg Mullavey, later of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman fame), that she’s crazy about. She wants to make sure that Mary likes him, so they start doing a lot of hang-outs TOGETHER, and Mary begins to think that Bob is into HER (and she MIGHT be into him, as well).

Rhoda decides to make Bob choose, and he quickly chooses Mary. Rhoda acts cool about it, but then, at the Teddy’s (which is amusingly being rushed because the banquet hall that they’re using is being used for a wedding very soon. One of the people at the WJM-TV table is a guest who is here for the wedding early), Rhoda tricks Mary into thinking that Mary won her category, and Mary goes up to accept when it is, of course, not her prize.

Rhoda and Mary then have an awesome fight where they “politely” point out all of the things that that dislike about each other. It’s great stuff. Meanwhile, Lou gives his staff (who all lost, of course), a made-up award, and it hilariously actually successfully brightens their mood.

It is amazing that this is only the ninth episode of the series, and you’d think you were watching a show in its eighth season by how well established all of the character interactions are. These really were some SMART writers, even if the gags are often pretty darn basic.

Great actors and sharp writing made for a great show.