New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 402212" data-attributes="member: 23">Season TwoAnd Now, Sitting In For Ted Baxter / Don’t Break The Chain / The Six-And-A-Half-Year Itch / …Is A Friend In Need / The Square-Shaped Room / Ted Over Heels / The Five-Minute Dress / Feeb / The Slaughter Affair / Baby Sit-Com / More Than Neighbours / The Care And Feeding Of Parents / Where There’s Smoke, There’s Rhoda / You Certainly Are A Big Boy / Some Of My Best Friends Are Rhoda / His Two Right ArmsIt strikes me that many - if not most - scenarios in MTM found their way into sitcoms that followed it. While there were, of course, sitcoms long before this series, the way the situations unfold here feels contemporary, as though this became something of a template or, at the very least, influenced what came later. These include standard situations such as The One Where The Wife Thinks The Husband Is Cheating When He’s Actually Planning A Nice Surprise. Or The One Where The Neighbour Moves In After A Fire To Everyone’s Exasperation. But even the more specific ones apply. An example of this is Mary feeling guilty after her complaint about poor service gets the waitress sacked, leading to her trying to fix things by arranging new employment for the girl at her own place of work. This exact premise was later used for a Will & Grace episode (with Grace in the Mary role). Likewise, I recall The Golden Girls’ Dorothy having a shallow, snobby new (or old) friend who tries to edge out one of her current closest friends until Dorothy tells her to go to Hell. Speaking of that one, Some Of My Best Friends Are Rhoda is an absolute blinder of an episode. Somewhere along the line I’d read or heard that one of the episodes addressed anti-Semitism and was curious to see how it would play out. It’s pleasing to see that it did so in a way that I don’t believe diluted the comedy, and was also unexpected for Rhoda not being directly involved (nor even explicitly knowing what had happened), with Mary experiencing and challenging her new friend Joanne’s bigotry, even briefly telling Joanne that she is Jewish herself. I don’t recall watching anything in which Mary Frann has appeared but her name is familiar for coming close to being cast as Sue Ellen on Dallas. Due to this I found myself watching trying to envisage her in that role. While I know little about her acting range and she has a very different energy to Linda Gray, I really could see her working in those early episodes since she did passive-aggressive very well here and convinced with the requisite snobbery with a brittle, cold edge when needed, but an intelligence and charisma that made sense of why she’d attract friends. I’d also buy her as a Miss Texas. Apparently Mary was best friends with Joan Van Ark as well. I watched this episode last night and yes - realising it’s a backdoor pilot made sense of the change in tone and the inordinate time spent with different players. It clicked when I saw Bill Daily’s name at the end and remembered scrolling past the previous discussion on it. I found Janet MacLachlan very engaging as Sherry, and liked Isabel Sanford as her mother. Beyond that, the new characters did nothing for me.</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =