Turns out, all it took to topple a cultural patriarchy was Mary Tyler Moore in slacks.
“She wasn’t trying to get on a soapbox,” Lena Waithe says, “but she lulled people into the future.” That quote might as well be the thesis of Being Mary Tyler Moore, the Emmy-nominated documentary Waithe and fellow producer Rishi Rajani brought to life over five long years of archival deep dives, emotional interviews, and a whole lot of waiting on the rights to air footage of Dick Cavett looking like a tool.
From the start, they knew this wasn’t just about MTM. “It’s about Mary, but it’s also about something much bigger,” Waithe says. “She was a career woman, she was a complicated mother, she was married three times. She was messy and ambitious and human.” In other words, not the sanitized sitcom saint people put on a pedestal.
Rishi came into the project with a Mary-shaped blind spot. “My family’s from London, so I didn’t grow up on American TV,” he says. “I knew the icon, not the person. But once you start watching her embrace singlehood in New York or finding love outside of Hollywood, you realize: these people we hold up as untouchable? They’re us. They just wore better blouses.”
The film’s emotional anchor is Dr. Robert Levine, Moore’s widower, who opened up their archives and their home. “He was the heartbeat,” says Waithe. “We just wanted to do right by him—and by Mary.”
And then there’s that jaw-dropper of an interview with David Susskind, who tries to graft her husband’s name onto hers while simultaneously condescending to her intellect. “She handled it so smoothly,” Waithe marvels. “She quotes The Feminine Mystique. She says she might get in trouble for suggesting women work outside the home. Even now, celebrities say stuff like, ‘Don’t cancel me, but…’ And here’s Mary, doing it in the ’60s.”
What stuck with both producers was how revolutionary Moore’s subtlety really was. “We had people come up to us after screenings and say, ‘You don’t understand how big it was just to see a woman wearing pants on TV,’” Rajani says. “Because that world didn’t let us wear pants to school.”
The idea of a woman never married, never softened into domesticity by the finale of her own show, still feels radical. “They never married her off before the show ended,” Waithe says. “Even today, someone would say, ‘We gotta get her a man before the credits roll.’ But they stuck to their guns.”
The reluctant trailblazer trope resonates with Waithe personally. “You don’t know when you’re doing something iconic. You’re just trying to make a good Thanksgiving episode,” she says, grinning. “I don’t think she set out to be a leader, but when she saw what was happening, she thought, ‘Okay, I’ll figure this out.’”
As for what’s next, Waithe and Rajani are teaming back up with director James Adolphus for a new documentary on Verzuz, the pandemic-era music battle series created by Swizz Beatz and Timbaland. “James had a beautiful thesis,” Rajani explains. “In times of struggle, America turns to Black music for comfort.”
Expect something raw, real, and joyful. Kind of like Mary Tyler Moore, with a trap beat.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
