Episode 1

And so begins our long, long journey through 325 episodes of the truly one of a kind, utterly brilliant, incisive, dryly satirical "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman". . .

This episode accomplishes everything a first episode needs to do, establishing the tone of the series and introducing us to the main characters. But it's also very funny, and contains two shocking plot developments that would have been unthinkable in any other contemporary series.

First, there's the revelation by Loretta that the nearby Lombardi family has been mass murdered, along with their 2 goats and 8 chickens. Mary's reaction to this news is typically Mary:

What kind of a maniac would kill 2 goats and 8 chickens?

And the people. The people, of course.

If you get the humor in that line, chances are you'll get the show. While Loretta is waxing philosophically about the meaning of such a horrific event, Mary wonders aloud about having a cup of coffee, and why the Lombardis were raising goats and chickens in the middle of suburban Fernwood.

It's hard to imagine any actress but Louise Lasser playing these beats just moments into a brand new series without losing audience sympathy, but somehow, she pulls it off. There's something so real, so authentic about Mary, even though all we've been shown so far is how shallow she is. She's a person who uses the safe, mundane, surface aspects of life, like consumer products and waxy yellow buildup, as a buffer against reality; it's not callousness or self absorption, but self-protection. This is Mary's coping mechanism, maybe her only coping mechanism. She retreats to these trivial, absurdly conventional concerns because the world beyond her waxy, yellowed floors has become too scary and incomprehensible to face.

The second shocking plot development comes at the very end of the episode, when Mary receives a phone call from the police informing her that Grampa Larkin is in jail, arrested as the Fernwood Flasher. This was the scene that sold me completely on the series the first time I saw it in 2007. Louise Lasser's hysterical (in both senses of the word) reaction cracked me up then, and it still does every time I watch it. It's a perfect encapsulation of what made her Mary so amazing: She's slightly uncomprehending, slightly dazed, funny yet still somehow legitimately, even tragically, vulnerable. Controlled hysteria has never been funnier.

Lasser has admitted that she herself didn't entirely "get" the tone of the series at first, but to me, she appears to have found her character completely from her very first moment on screen, seen dreamily watching an afternoon soap opera on her kitchen TV. It's impossible to imagine the series having worked with any other actress as its anchor¹. Louise Lasser's performance was a revelation to me, not just in its consistent brilliance over the course of 325 episodes, but in her bursts of staggering inspiration in certain specific scenes and episodes. I've always enjoyed her in any role I've seen her play over the years; I already knew how funny she could be, but I had no idea what a truly great dramatic actress she is as well until seeing MH2 in full.

We also get our first glimpse of the private life of Charlie and Loretta Haggers next door (Graham Jarvis and Mary Kay Place), one of the few convincingly romantic relationships on television between two people this hideously mismatched in age and physical beauty. Credit where due: you've gotta hand it to Mary Kay Place for her acting talent. It can't have been too challenging for Graham Jarvis to convince us he's a lovestruck husband opposite a woman as naturally gorgeous as Place was, but the other way around? If you don't think this required major acting chops, your eyes must have shut reflexively when Charlie emerged from the bathroom shirtless, because. . . my goodness.

Also included in this debut show is the first of many, many brilliant scenes between Mary and Tom alone in their bedroom, with Tom coming off immediately as a complete tool. His character displays more depth as the series continues, but in the earliest days of the show, he sets my teeth on edge in his unbelievably sexist, demeaning, dismissive treatment of his wife. The marital troubles they experience provide one the show's best means of exploring the changing war between the sexes during this time period. One of the reasons the show feels so modern despite its 1970s trappings is that too many of the battles over gender roles portrayed in MH2 are still being waged today.

Those totally new to the show may not know what to make of it at first. This is perhaps the first comedy to completely eschew a laugh track in TV history², another element that makes it feel very modern in our current era of mostly single camera comedies. The acting is very naturalistic, with sloppy grammar and stuttering and repetitive rambling akin to the dialogue in a Woody Allen film³, or an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. This, too, is an unprecedented quality for a television show of its time, when actors in comedies and dramas alike invariably delivered flawless readings of every line.

There's so much more to discuss in just this first episode, but there's plenty of time to delve into the many other aspects of the series so well worth examination. I hope to have some other regular contributors or at least guests along the way, assuming I can sell some of my friends on watching the show; it's so utterly different from anything else I've seen that it's hard to predict who will get it and who won't.

But even if I end up going it all alone, I hope you'll join me and please offer your thoughts in the comments section. I never thought I'd have the opportunity to see the whole series, and I'm delighted to say a show I waited a generation to see not only didn't disappoint, it far exceeded my expectations, and I already knew I loved the measly 25 episodes released by Sony in 2007.

Per the blog's tagline, it's time to scrape the waxy yellow buildup off the reputation of this unjustly neglected classic. Many thanks are due to Shout! Factory from all of us who have waited so long to see it.

¹ Lasser is said to have insisted she be in every episode, despite the strain that workload would ultimately cause. Writer/producer/co-creator Ann Marcus said that they tried to talk her out of it, pointing out that the lead actors on daytime soaps would appear in, at most, 3 episodes of their series per week. But she wouldn't listen, and as Marcus concluded, it was for the best, because "what would an episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman be without Mary Hartman?" Viewers would eventually find out, when Lasser departed at the end of Season 2. The series was retitled Forever Fernwood and ran for one more season, but those episodes, understandably, aren't included in the already mammoth Shout! Factory DVD set. Back

² It's true that M*A*S*H, which debuted a few years earlier, sometimes discarded the laugh track (primarily for scenes in the operating room), but never for an entire episode until several years into in its run, and even then, only for "special" episodes. Back

³ Most folks are doubtless already aware that Lasser was Woody Allen's second wife, and co-starred in some of his earliest films, notably Bananas (my favorite of her lines: "I knew there was something missing!" If you've seen the film, you'll know exactly what I'm referring to.) Back