Sunday, November 3, 2013
MTM vs. Lear
From your viewings of All in the Family, Good Times, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and your reading of Kirsten Lentz’s essay, how do you think Norman Lear’s shows differed from MTM’s? Why do you think the term “quality” was often used to refer to MTM’s shows and “relevance” to label Lear’s programs? How does Lentz see these productions as differing?
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The main difference between the "quality" shows of MTM and the "relevant" shows of Norman Lear are their topics of discussion.
ReplyDeleteThe Mary Tyler Moore show is highly feminist. It portrays a woman succeeding in the typically men-filled world of television. She is single and lives on her own in an upper middle-class apartment. The character of Ted Baxter is able to provide a tool for the criticism of both masculinity and television. His failed attempts to appear knowledgeable and to act as an authority are the MTM show's way of criticizing. I would argue that the MTM ways of criticism are more subtle than Norman Lear's - possibly a reason for the label of "quality". It takes a bit more to extract information from MTM shows. It's also important to note the actual settings of the MTM show as well as other "quality" shows. The sets are very bright and and visually appealing. Both Mary's apartment and the set of the news station are extremely tidy. All of these are in stark contrast to Norman Lear shows. The MTM show also does not portray, or at least is not as open, about sexuality. Mary Tyler Moore can often be seen as the epitome of goodness and morality in this regard.
Norman Lear shows are more concerned with race. Episodes tend to directly approach issues with race, such as the All in the Family episode where Archie is thrown into an elevator and clashes with an African American man, as well as a Latino man. An episode of Maude directly looks at abortion. In contrast with MTM, Norman Lear shows are not at all subtle in the way they criticize things. They're concerned with being "real" and portraying realistic scenarios of working-class people. This could be where the term "relevant" emerged from. The settings of the shows are duller and don't try to use bright, happy colors. The issues that emerge in the plots of the shows are supposed to be comparable to real life events. Norman Lear shows are also not afraid to approach sexuality, and will directly bring up sex.
While MTM and Norman Lear shows were sitcoms from the same time period, they were very different in terms of what they portrayed and how they portrayed it.
During the 1970s, television studios began to take notice of the changing tides of feminism and civil rights in the country and create programming that reflected this new landscape. The studio MTM Enterprises and the programs of Norman Lear did this in noticeably different ways. MTM’s shows were “touted as more ‘literate’, more stylistically complex, and offering more character development than most sitcoms” (48). They were therefore deemed to be quality programs that stood out on in the “vast wasteland” of primetime television. These programs also addressed the supposed femininity and second-class position of television as compared to the film industry by tying together TV’s struggle to compete with film and women’s desire to succeed in a male-dominated world. By using television to examine and critique itself, the programs took on a new sense of modernism and quality. On the other hand, the programs made by Norman Lear were grounded in representational realism and strove to bring attention to each and every struggle going on in this time period, especially race and racism. Shows like All in the Family were relevant because they showed the darker and grittier sides of racial politics as well as “working-class culture, sexual licentiousness, and to some extent masculinity” (65).
ReplyDeleteThe difference between quality and relevant television is that quality TV was more concerned with the aesthetics of the text and the mechanisms of production while relevant television was made as responses to social and political concerns of the 70s. MTM productions was deeply concerned with style and as a direct response to Minow's "Vast Wasteland" speech wanted to elevated television, specifically the sitcom, to a respectable level by utilizing "highly gendered representations of the production company itself," meaning that the shows were highly feminized (48). The relevant television coming from Lear dealt with controversial subjects in order to address the current 70s political and social climate. Topics that relevant shows would take on included, “women’s liberation, impotence, homosexuality, racism, rape, extramarital sex, menopause, and gun control,” and as we saw in All in the Family (dealing with racism), Good Times (dealing with poverty), and Maude (dealing with abortion), these shows heavy handedly addressed these issues head on.
ReplyDeleteThe two aspects that discern said "quality" are directness and aesthetics. In addressing directness, it is important to note that both the reading and the screenings demonstrate that MTM did encompass social issues of feminism, but in an indirect manner. It does so through showing a driven, independent woman struggling to succeed in a male dominated industry. The show was also shot with good camera work and a colorful crispness (unlike Lear's television) that made the show a work of quality.
ReplyDeleteUnlike MTM, Lear's shows directly addressed issues by bluntly talking about them. Mary Tyler Moore would not state "it sure is hard to be a woman in this male business." Lear's works, on the other hand, directly fed a myriad of class, race, and feminist issues into dialogue in a way that clearly draws the issues at hand into play rather than highlighting characters.
From my perception of the screening, there is a deeper level of quality that would be appreciated now in comparison to the directness of Lear's work. In the episode we watched, there was in fact an issue addressed for the episode--the issue of how to cope with death. Though this issue was not topical, it is a part of the human experience that will always remain relevant. I think that this exploration of an issue rather than a direct address was more thought provoking rather than instructional--thus brining a layer of intellectual quality.
Also in my opinion, I think the notion of quality was somewhat class constructed. Of course quality (more expensive work) would be geared toward those with funds—those who are already in power who don’t want to be made uncomfortable by being forced to question their lifestyles. Mary Tyler Moore, with crispness and pretty sets, was catering to a more gentile class. Lear’s work, on the other hand, had a grittier aspect to which those in the working class could relate. The concept of quality was probably much more economically driven that critically.
To really assess the quality versus relevance debate between Norman Lear shows and Mary Tyler Moore shows, we must look at how social topics are discussed in both shows. Both programs deal with topics that are progressive for the time but each approach is different. MTM programing discusses current issues covertly while Lear's shows are more overt.
ReplyDeleteBoth Maude and Mary Tyler Moore are examples of feminist programming. If we examine the feminist trends between Maude and Mary Tyler Moore, we have our answer. Maude was progressive in the sense that the episode directly deals with the issue of abortion. The two part episode deals with this struggle of should she keep the baby or should she assert her control over her body and get the abortion. The episode provides insight into how women can control their bodies directly. This is groundbreaking considering abortion was just legalized around the time of this show. It serves as a PSA in a way.
Mary Tyler Moore was progressive by design. She is an independent woman who has a significant career in the television news. Her character is therefore progressive for television at the time and relevant as women start gaining and asserting independence in this point of time. Never are issues like abortion or sexual discrimination brought up in this show. It is just assumed that it could be normal for a women to have a career. Sometimes having a message is not having a message at all. Her coworkers accept her, and as a society we should accept women in the workplace.
I think the quality versus relevance debate then can be centered around how progress topics are dealt with. It is classier just to have a women be independent(Mary Tyler Moore) than have her struggle with her independence to tell the audience that women should have independence(Maude?. Though this is a different view of the quality versus relevance debate besides comparing technical features of each show etc, it still is applicable.Showing minority struggle in Lear’s shows and by showing minority triumphs in MTM are a way of seeing how relevant material can be presented in different ways and spark part of the quality versus relevance debate.
Since most of the other commenters have discussed it already, I will only briefly recap Lentz’s discussion of “quality” (associated with MTM productions) versus “relevance” (associated with Tandem/TAT productions). Lentz talks about these terms in several different ways, one of the most obvious being the ways in which programs in the two categories differed stylistically. “Quality” shows like the Mary Tyler Moore Show were often shot on film. The world of the show reflected the life of an upwardly mobile professional, with tidy work and living spaces. Lighting was sunny, made to look like natural light. In contrast, “relevance” shows like All In The Family were less crisp in appearance, with orange and brown tints, unclean environments, and low key lighting that allowed for very little contrast between characters and their backdrops. The world of these shows was more theatrical and less natural. However, a key difference between the two that no one else has mentioned is the fact that “quality” television, with its close association with feminism, often employed self-reflexive techniques to critique television itself. “Relevance” programming, on the other hand, was linked to race representations and racial politics, and thus was more concerned with portraying the world of the show as being very much like reality.
ReplyDeleteI found it very easy to apply this argument of Lentz’s to our own viewings of the shows. The Mary Tyler Moore Show fits very easily in to the “quality” category. For one, the character of Mary Richards upholds feminist ideals by being a single, professional woman who provides for herself. As discussed above, the show is also very aesthetically appealing and clean. Further, the show’s usage of self-reflexivity is quite apparent, as it exposes the television production process by using a news studio as one of its main settings. As Lentz notes, the Mary Tyler Moore Show often used its show within a show (The Six O’Clock News) as an example of bad television in order to uphold MTM as good television. In the episode we watched, Ted does a very bad televised tribute to Chuckles the clown, who died in a freak accident. His embarrassing broadcast is intercut with shots of Mary and Lou cringing and reacting poorly to his bumbling improvisation. So, by showing the viewing audience an example of bad television, the show’s producers were able to distance themselves from that very representation.
Another show we watched, Good Times, provided a very good example of “relevance” programming. The setting of the show was a grungy apartment in New York. Conventional looking characters populated the world of the show, eating burnt oatmeal and sitting on run-down looking furniture. In short, the show very much follows Lentz’s idea about stylistic difference. The content of the show also clearly reflected an attempt to portray a real, black family struggling with real problems. The episode we watched revolved around the issue of trying to scrape up enough money to avoid being evicted from the apartment. Instead of the self-reflexivity and feminism of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Good Times clearly focused more on reality and race. Thus, these two shows are good examples of the idea of “quality” versus “relevance.”
While ostensibly all half hour sitcoms airing on CBS in the early to late 1970s, Norman Lear’s All in the Family, Maude, and Good Times and MTM’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show represent two very distinctive depictions of cultural and sociopolitical change. Delineating this disparity as one between “quality” and “relevance,” Kirsten Lentz astutely contrasts the racial representations that distinguish Lear productions with the feminist gender politics of MTM programming.
ReplyDeleteEpitomizing the “quality” label, The Mary Tyler Moore Show set about rebranding television’s “vast wasteland” of degraded content through the utilization of a dual feminist logic that simultaneously advanced women and the medium itself. Occupying a great deal of the narrative structure, the newsroom in which Mary works and the program that she produces together operate as a self-reflexive device that allowed the show to comment upon the problematic aspects of television as an institution, essentially functioning as a mediator between “good” and “bad” programming.
While MTM Enterprises harnessed the power of feminism in its bid to advance television toward the same artistic legitimacy already enjoyed by film and theater, Norman Lear’s Tandem/TAT Productions became synonymous with the social and political responsiveness of “relevance” programming. Most often remembered for their groundbreaking willingness to tackle controversial topics, these programs were marketed to a growing demographic of progressively minded youths as reflections of “real world” issues. Indeed, while the episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show screened in class was implicitly “raceless,” its plot structured around the death of a beloved clown, the episodes of All in the Family and Good Times directly acknowledged and revolved around ignorant bigotry and the inherent poverty of inner-city housing projects, respectively.
That being said, Lear’s All in the Family spin-off, Maude, presents an interesting fusion of feminism and social issues. Whereas The Mary Tyler Moore Show embodies a sort of aestheticized feminism in which female progress and quality television remain largely visual – Mary’s middle-class surroundings and the sharpness of the film itself – Maude’s portrayal of unwanted pregnancy and abortion illustrate a more substantive version, one committed to addressing the battle for reproductive rights that defined the second-wave movement.
There were differences in the methods of productions between MTM programs and Norman Lear programs, with the former shot on film and the latter programs shot on video. However, the major divide between MTM’s “quality” productions and Norman Lear’s “relevance” productions was mostly regarding the way they handled discussion of social issues.
ReplyDeleteAll In the Family and Good Times were more apt to address political and social directly, without beating around the bush. Lear’s productions were more apt to be caustic satires than traditional, apolitical sitcoms, despite its adherence to tropes that harken back to the ethnic working class shows of early television. The topic of discussion was race and race relations in most of Lear’s shows. Good Times featured a black family living in Harlem while All in the Family focused on a white, Queens family and its patriarch, the lovable, laughable bigot Archie Bunker. In each episode, Bunker undergoes an experience that challenges his radically viewpoints, but remains steadfast in his stereotyped convictions.
By contrast, The Mary Tyler Moore Show tackles gender issues, but does it in a manner that is more subtle than its counterparts produced by Lear. It’s leading lady is works in a male dominated environment and typical ideas of masculinity are lampooned, but these issues are never directly discussed. In addition, the show was viewed by television critics as being more visually appealing and featuring more character development than the usual sitcom.
The difference between the "quality" of MTM and the "relevance" of Lear's shows was exactly what their those words would make you think. The Mary Tyler Moore show focused on creating a quality production that has well developed sets and looked vibrant and well polished. While Lear's shows focused instead on being topical and discussing subjects that made people uncomfortable and that they were pressing issues of the time. Not to say that Mary Tyler Moore didn't discuss topical events the show's main character was a feminist in an up and coming business world. But it never directly targeted the problems directly. On the flip side Lear's shows went out of their way in order to bring the hard hitting problems to viewers.
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