Word: asner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Edward Asner, who plays Lou, has been developing the character for seven seasons. On Mary Tyler Moore he first played his role as another gruff but lovable TV sitcom boss-like Lucy's Gale Gordon. By the time that series concluded last season, Asner had given Lou three dimensions: he was still a comic figure, but he was also a lonely, somewhat self-destructive man. Now Asner takes the character still further. In the new series (billed as drama, not situation comedy), Lou has left Minneapolis for a job as city editor of a Los Angeles newspaper...
...most of the acting clichés usually found in Front Page-style entertainments. Nancy Marchand plays the paper's imperious, widowed publisher as a cross between the Washington Post's Katharine Graham and Dorothy Schiff, the former owner of the New York Post. If Marchand and Asner keep up their game of verbal Ping Pong, they could become TV's Hepburn and Tracy...
...doubt some of the supporting players, like their MTM antecedents, will some day have series of their own. In the meantime, it is Asner who dominates the show. Whether Lou Grant is sitting disconsolately alone in his sterile L.A. hotel room or counseling reporters in a rundown newspaper bar, he comes across as a man who has been knocked around by the real world, rather than by writers at a Hollywood story conference. That a network would give such a creature an hour of its schedule is one of this season's major flukes...
...dramas The cops and gumshoes who dominate the TV job market will be joined by a few other career men. Actor Ed Asner, former chief of MTM's newsroom, gets a Los Angeles newspaper job-and a crusty lady boss-on CBS's Lou Grant. Lawyers Rosetti and Ryan, having survived a spring tryout, will hang out their shingle on NBC. Patrick McGoohan will scrub up in CBS's Rafferty, the season's only medical show, playing a former Army doctor whose professional skills outshine his bedside manner...
...characters developed, changed, some times in ways disconcerting to all those schooled in the inevitability of happy endings. Lou Grant (Edward Asner) and his wife Edie (Priscilla Morrill) separated; she felt stultified and wanted to try a different life. Ah well, the faithful said, they will get back together. They did not; they got divorced. In one of the more touching shows, Edie remarried, with Lou attending; afterward, the entire WJM newsroom ended up weeping uncontrollably in a bar as Lou tried to comfort them. In another moving and improbably funny show. Chuckles the Clown, while dressed...