Word: sitcomming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Coming just after M*A*S*H, which was No. 2 in the ratings last week, Flo has everything going for it but a knock down script. The best line is a leftover from Alice, "Kiss mah grits!" The writ ing is not bad, by sitcom standards, but it is not nearly as good as Polly Holliday deserves. She is one of TV's truly funny women, and she needs a script as frothy as the stuff coming out of the cooler at the Yellow Rose...
...benevolent father of the Miller family, Ted Wiprud sets the tone for all the other actors. Wiprud could easily have lapsed into a fifties sitcom portrayal of a consistently sympathetic and understanding father. More convincing than that, his performance shows real anger and also real forgiveness. Amusing when harassed by his exasperating offspring and touching when anxious for them, Wiprud stays in the background throughout the play. A quiet, unspectacular role, mouthing soothing commonplaces to his children about the necessity of growing up, Wiprud nevertheless makes this father the sort everyone would like to have. As his wife, Shelley Evans...
What Moore has settled for-playing the bedridden Claire Harrison-is unlike anything she has ever done and especially unlike the two sitcom characters that made her famous: the perky housewife Laura Petrie of The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66) and the spunky TV news producer Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77). Says Moore: "I felt an affinity for Claire. She has a wonderful sense of humor, but she also knows very definitely what she is about...
SEPARATED. Mary Tyler Moore, 42, TV sitcom queen of the '70s; and TV Producer Grant Tinker, 53; after 17 years of marriage...
...Best Sitcom: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which, beginning in 1970, provided seven seasons of sophisticated humor and showed a woman succeeding in what was once a man's job. The Game Is On: ABC took long odds by introducing sport to prime time in 1970 with Monday Night Football. Since then just about everything except golf has been played at night, doubling in a decade, to nearly 1,400 hours in 1979, the amount of sport on network TV and giving the fans World Series games played in arctic conditions and, of course, Thursday Night Football...