Word: lear
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mary Hartman is currently suffering through separation from her husband, exposure to venereal disease and the lack of tranquilizers around the house. But how is she, really? For all her troubles, very well, it seems. Norman Lear's soap-opera sendup, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, is now in its seventh week, the most talked-about new show of TV's numb-drum season. Most followers of loopy Mary and the other soap-flake characters of Fernwood must indulge their new addiction either in the afternoon or late at night. Shunned by the networks, the syndicated five...
...Norman Lear, creator-producer of the Maude series, developed the simplistic two-part story because a member of his family took lithium for manic-depression "and I have personally seen the results." Lear had the scripts checked by Harvard's Dr. Marcia Guttentag and by the director of research at Rockland State Hospital, Dr. Nathan S. Kline, a lithium enthusiast who has treated some 2,000 patients with the drug. Kline's book on depression, From Sad to Glad, was plugged on the Maude show...
...hold. Norman Lear's latest entries, though marginally more professional as productions, are more offensive. His newest target for simple patronization is fat people. THE DUMPLINGS (NBC, Wednesday, 9:30 p.m. E.S.T.)-don't you just love the title?-are chubby James Coco and padded Geraldine Brooks. They are the proprietors of a Mom and Pop lunch counter who are required to coo repulsively at each other and rub flab, while their slender customers express ironic wonder that these lard tubs are actually happier than they are. Gross...
...TIME (CBS, Tuesday, 9:30 p.m. E.S.T.), Lear makes the same mistake that the producers of the late Fay did. Instead of the humor inherent in the show's situation-a formerly married woman's adjustment to the single state-he has chosen to cram it with familiar sitcom gags...
...Today show and heard Moynihan describing it to Barbara Walters as a major American initiative. In a widely publicized outburst last November, Britain's Ambassador Ivor Richard compared Moynihan (without actually naming him) variously to a trigger-happy Wyatt Earp, a vengeful Savonarola and a demented King Lear "raging amidst the storm on the blasted heath." Another Western delegate claims that "never in my U.N. experience have I seen such open criticism of an American ambassador by my colleagues...