Mary Tyler Moore – She Turned Our World On With Her Smile

The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Opening) from DERTV on Vimeo.

When I heard that TV legend Mary Tyler Moore had passed away at 80, I felt great sadness because I had so enjoyed her work, and as a kid I fell in love with her as many of her fans and TV viewers did as well. All of us certainly could answer the question posed in the song from the opening credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show – “Who can turn the world on with her smile?” – Mary!!!

I first encountered her on The Dick Van Dyke Show, playing the mother to a child a bit older than I was at the time. What I watched were called “reruns” because the sitcom had gone off the air as a first-run series years before, and my mother would have it on during the day as she worked around the house and I was playing with my toys.

What I liked about Mary’s depiction of Laura Petrie was that she wasn’t the typical mother from other show’s reruns like The Donna Reed Show (Donna Reed) or Leave It To Beaver (Barbara Billingsly) because gone were the strings of pearls and fancy dresses while doing housework. Like my mother she wore normal clothing like pants, would cry over things, and also could get angry. She seemed like a real mom to me, but also was incredibly funny and beautiful too.

When something would go wrong she would look at her husband (played by the incredible Dick Van Dyke) and moan, “Oh, Robbbbb!” and that was an indelible TV treasure as memorable as Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy saying, “Eeewww!” or Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden's “I’ve got a BIG mouth” on The Honeymooners.

When I watched Mary playing Laura years later as an adult, I realized other things about her portrayal. Laura was no pushover for Rob or anyone else for that matter. She had her own mind, wore those pants (which I now realized were sexy capris), and made mistakes that sometimes were not easily solved (like when she reveals the secret that Rob’s boss wears a toupee).

Mary made some films during the period between the end of The Dick Van Dyke Show and the start of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and later would display her acting skills in more films like Ordinary People, which showed her impressive range and that she was able to handle far more complex and difficult roles, even one like this cruel mother of a son whose greatest crime was surviving the death of his brother.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show premiered in 1970, and those of us who loved Mary as Laura fell in love all over again with Mary Richards. This character had some of Laura’s initiative and strength, but she was also a single woman and made no apologies – sort of the natural evolution of what would have happened to Laura if she had never met and married Rob Petrie.

In many ways her Mary played it straight while the looney characters all around her got many of the laughs, but her reactions and ability to break into tears (also a Laura Petrie staple) endeared her to the fans again. She was a single woman who had a career (surrounded by men in her office and did the same work they did), dated many men (with the hint that these relationships were much more than platonic), and had the integrity of living her life the way she chose to do. Mary Richards’s character was a turning point in TV history and set the tone for so many other female TV characters to follow.

Mary could get laughs too, and as I have seen on the Internet these last few days, almost everyone remembers the scene at the funeral of Chuckles the Clown as their favorite from the series. Here Mary displays her acting chops as she attempts to be the only one to be respectful, but then as the deadpan reverend goes on and on she cannot help but start laughing, and then later breaks into tears. The full range of emotions she explores in the scene are noteworthy, and it is almost impossible not to laugh while watching it.

To hear of Mary's loss is painful for so many of us because she played two indelible TV characters – how many actors or actresses can even claim to have played one – that have remained in our hearts all these years. While her work will live on, we all mourn her loss as we turn yet another page in our lives.

I like to think of Mary Tyler Moore now as the girl in the opening credit sequence of her show walking through the snowy park and turning it green, the one whose megawatt smile did indeed turn the world on. Somewhere she is throwing her hat up in the air and love is all around her. Rest in peace, Mary Tyler Moore.

MLB Hall of Fame Inductees – Is The Steroid Era Slowly Being Forgotten and Forgiven?

Like so many other baseball fans at the time, I enjoyed what some people called “the summer of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa” – the battle to see who would be home run king and break the all-time single season record was a crowd pleaser. In 1999 the fallout that came after the longest baseball strike in Major League Baseball history (August 1994-April 1995) still haunted the fans and affected ticket sales and TV ratings; this slugging contest seemed to be just what the doctor (or was it then commissioner Bud Selig?) ordered.

Yet there were those of us even then who wondered about McGwire and Sosa’s bulging arms and their moonshot homers. These were guys who went from looking like tall string beans to Arnold Schwarzenegger. While we might have wanted to think the ball was juiced (as some claimed), it was far more likely that they were, but even people who may have thought it seemed not to care. This contest ended with Sosa hitting 63 dingers and McGwire swatting 65. Records were broken, baseball was back, but what price had been paid for all the glory?

Flash forward to 2017 and the announcements of this year’s selections for the MLB Hall of Fame. It is baseball’s most exclusive club, and being a member guarantees a player’s legacy for future generations. The choices this year may leave some people like myself scratching their heads and thinking about where we are heading in what is now (or is it?) the post Steroid Era in baseball.

Like McGwire and Sosa, Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez used to be a string bean who was a decent catcher and had little or no pop. Suddenly “Pudge” became the Incredible Hulk and was swatting lots of long flies. So what happened? Did he do a Popeye and suck down cans of spinach? Did he hit the gym every day and just blossom? Or was it something else?

Rodriguez’s co-inductee is Jeff Bagwell, the former Houston Astros slugger who hit 449 homers with arms the size of Mount Rushmore. Questions always seemed to arise about his morphing into this power hitter overnight, but there never has been any definitive proof that he used PEDs, yet we who saw Bagwell play know he hit those rockets just like Sosa and McGwire before him, and if that ball was juiced then why wasn’t everyone hitting all those homers?

While Rodriguez has denied PED use, former swollen homer god Jose Canseco implicated Rodriguez in his book Juiced, claiming that he actually injected drugs into the catcher during their time playing for the Texas Rangers. Of course, this is not concrete proof but just adds another log to the fire of suspicions.

At this point it seems the Baseball Writers’ Association of America is starting to either forget or even forgive players from the so-called Steroid Era as they are coming up for nomination. Rodgriguez makes it on his first year on the ballot, while Bagwell had to go through seven ballots before getting selected.

Some critics have noted that the turning point may have been last year when former New York Mets and LA Dodger catcher Mike Piazza was elected despite years of rumors about his use of PEDs. Piazza, like Bagwell and Rodriguez, has always denied usage, and the salient things that connect Piazza to these guys are his bulging muscles and homers sent into orbit.

The obvious issue is that two guys for whom real evidence of PED use exists – Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens – got a little closer on the ballot this year. If guys with rumors of PED use are getting in, how long before they do as well?

In the past I have argued for the sport to be pure because there are many players who work hard and play the game the true way. They work out, they practice, they stay human, and give 100%. Those guys have always been the true baseball heroes, even though they will most times not be recognized because their numbers are ordinary and they have not distinguished themselves.

Rumors are what they are and evidence is what it is. Bonds and Clemens put up extraordinary numbers, and all the other stuff does not negate their records (even with all the talk of using asterisks), and it would seem the BWAA is moving away from the practice of turning away from these guys and recognizing statistical greatness regardless of rumors or proof.

So Rodriguez and Bagwell say they did not use PEDS, and we can either accept that or call them liars. Either way they will be inducted into the Hall of Fame. It has also been said that statistics don’t lie, and if the BWAA embraces that, it seems clear that Bonds and Clemens will be inducted sometime before their opportunities expire.

I don’t know what this means to all the fans, but I recall how kids had McGwire and Sosa posters tacked up on their walls during that wild slugging contest. They have all grown up now and perhaps are forgetting or forgiving (and maybe some of them are members of the BWWA) those sluggers for their use of steroids.

It is today’s children who are also watching and getting mixed messages. We tell them in school and at home about the dangers of drugs, but they discover that former baseball players are getting rewarded for their past use of them. How do we explain it in a way to make sense? I am not sure that we can.

TV Review: Season One of Westworld – To Murder and Create

There will be time to murder and create.

-T.S. Eliot

Finding the time to actually watch TV shows is difficult these days, but most especially around the holiday season. I have been waiting to watch the last five episodes of HBO’s Westworld and, thanks to the handy DVR and a big snowstorm, I finally got to binge-watching the truly indelible first season. As to not ruin anything for those of you who may be in the midst of watching or have yet to get to it, this review will avoid spoilers.

Westworld is based on the film written and directed by Michael Crichton, which depicted a futuristic Old West tourist theme park where animated robotic characters interacted with human guests. James Brolin and Richard Benjamin play guests who are wannabee cowboys, and most memorably Yul Brynner is the robotic Man in Black (reprising in some ways his iconic character from The Magnificent Seven) who malfunctions and tries to gun them down.

In the TV series the haunting title sequence sets the tone from the very beginning – we get flashes of western and sci-fi motifs and even a glimpse of a half-robot/half-human looking like da Vinci’s Virtruvian Man – all set to the haunting piano first played by robotic hands and then morphing into a player piano straight from some dusty saloon. It is a fitting start to the proceedings to follow.

With J.J. Abrams and Christopher Nolan as executive producers, we are right to expect big (and unusual things). The first episode (directed by Nolan) establishes the scenario differently than the film by giving us a glimpse of the robotic characters called “hosts” (in a weird twist on Disney’s Cast Members at their parks) as having distinct feelings and personalities. We get a glimpse of the romantic pair Dolores (an outstanding Evan Rachel Wood) and Teddy (James Marsden) before they are attacked by the human Man in Black (Ed Harris) who is in search of a “maze” that will figure symbolically in the story line.

There are problems with the hosts behaving strangely and the guests behaving badly from the start, and the entire premise of the series revolves around these issues – should the hosts do anything but function as programmed and serve accordingly? Why is it not okay for guests (who have paid an exorbitant amount of money to be there) to do whatever they please? There are many other questions that the series poses, of course, most salient among them is what happens when you play God? The answer could be that you get to murder and create as you please, but since you are only playing a god and not really one there are consequences.

At the center of the story is the exquisite Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Robert Ford, the seeming lord and master of Westworld (though he has the Delos board of directors to whom he must answer) who has an agenda and then some. His programming of the hosts becomes a question for other humans working closely with him, including his partner Arnold (a terrific Jeffrey Wright) and Charlotte (Tessa Thompson), whose sympathies bend toward the board.

Ford has given the hosts backstories, but when there are behavioral issues their memories are erased, yet the procedure doesn’t seem to work very well. Why give the hosts such deep memories in the first place and how is that part of Ford’s greater but secret plan for the theme park? Hopkins plays Ford as benevolent dictator, his face a road map of the horrors he has conceived and allowed to flourish, a Dr. Frankenstein-type figure who has not only stolen fire from the gods but has mastered it for his own seemingly twisted needs.

When hosts are brought into the clinic for service and re-programming, they are usually sitting naked on a shelf. This objectifies them as just robotic chattel, and we even see a case of one lab technician abusing a host. The series is clearly pushing the boundaries of what it is to be human and to act humanely, as well as the concepts of artificial intelligence and the sentience associated with it and what rights such sentience would seem to grant an AI.

One host brought in for service is Maeve (a powerful performance by Thandie Newton), a madam in the saloon who continues to have memories of a lost daughter despite having her memory wiped. This is an ongoing extended metaphor that plagues Dolores as well, and the notion that the hosts believe that they have had these memories based on real experiences (as opposed to Ford implanting them to give them backstories) is haunting and effective.

Ethical questions abound as we see Dolores, Teddy, and Maeve have flashbacks – and what sometimes amounts to fast forwards – and we believe that they believe they have lived these lives even though we know they could not possibly have done so, unless when the timeline is altered (and multiple timelines give hints that these robots have assumed different identities over the course of 30 or more years). We wonder which hosts may have once been human (or at least harbor real human memories) and which humans may be unknowingly hosts, and the implications are that the difference may not matter all that much in the long run in terms of treating all beings with the respect they deserve.

When human William (Jimmi Simpson) comes to Westworld to have a blast with his friend Logan (Ben Barnes), he does not seem to be ready to fully embrace the bacchanalia at hand. Logan has no such issues, but after William encounters Dolores, he falls in love with her and accompanies her on a journey of discovery that Logan cannot condone or understand.

Is William meant to be sort of a witness to the human depravity and also perhaps a conduit to bring sanity into the equation? It seems that he is the only “good” human in the theme park – except perhaps for lab technician Felix (Leonardo Lam); however, others like The Man in Black and Ford make it clear that humans should hold no illusions and want the robots to serve their purpose – to be used and abused – and nothing more.

It is hard to go further without revealing too many things that would ruin the pleasures off what comes next, but there are moments of foreshadowing early on that get more obvious as we move forward that the bots are simmering with anger. Some humans like Arnold and Charlotte are raging against the machine as well, with Arnold wanting more autonomy for the hosts and Charlotte hoping to remove Ford from his position before the damage cannot be undone.

Then there is that maze – the one the Man in Black is trying to find – that could be symbolic of the trap set for everyone caught up in Westworld – it’s not just a theme park but an established society that turns out to be a labyrinth that perhaps no one (robot or human) can escape.

Let it suffice to say that by the time we get through the tenth episode that the season finale satisfies our desire to resolve some of our many questions but leaves enough of them tantalizingly unanswered. We also get a brief glimpse of Samurai World and wonder if there is going to be interaction with it in season two. And just how many more of these “worlds” are also out there?

As it stands the first season of Westworld gives us ten episodes that are like the opening chapters of a great novel that compels us to keep reading; the problem is we are left in a position to be unable to turn the page at this point and are kept waiting (until 2018 – yikes!). Leaving us wanting more certainly applies here, and HBO seems happy to have done that and also to have another big hit on its plate that fans are ready to devour.

The acting in the series is superb, and if Hopkins doesn’t get nominated for an Emmy (sadly no Golden Globe nomination) then there is something wrong indeed. Wright, Newton, Harris and others all give memorable and impressive performances. Wood (nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama) especially shines in her powerful turn as Dolores, and she is giving Melissa Benoist (Supergirl) a run for the money as TV’s most radiantly beautiful female star.

The series is glorious to behold with wide-open vistas that are apropos to the Wild West, yet also features the sterile and claustrophobic labs and Ford’s lair complete with player piano (and robotic piano player) and host faces on the wall that are stark and foreboding. The look of the characters is stunningly conceived as well in their elaborate western costumes or stiff rubber lab coats and business suits. This dichotomy is deliberate and sets for juxtaposition of the two opposing worlds – not just the modern facility and the fictitious western locales, but also the lives of the hosts and the human guests.

The cinematography, art direction, and set production are all stellar, and the haunting musical direction of Ramin Dwjadi sets the tone for the proceedings. Makeup and sets are all first caliber, and there is a general feeling that this TV series is bigger than its britches, a story told on such a grand scale that it is just busting at the seams and waiting to explode onto a movie screen, yet what is being done here cannot be done in films because the novelization of a story works best on the small screen.

As the narrative unfolds we continually find ourselves rooting for the hosts to be free of suppression and abuse and to ultimately find their true selves, even if that means coming to the realization they are not who they have always believed themselves to be. The problem is freedom always comes with a price tag, and there is a distinct possibility that the hosts will discover that even their desire to be free has been scripted for them.

As for the humans, we are left wondering who among them is actually free since the narratives seem to have been written for them as well. Rising above all the detritus of human versus host controversies, Ford embraces the dark side with fervor and yet gives some reasonable enough explanations for why he has done everything; however, like Dr. Frankenstein before him, Ford should know that when you play with fire eventually you are going to get burned.

Season one of Westworld is worth your time to watch, enjoy, and ponder. Going back over each episode gives one a chance to not only savor its many delights, but to contemplate all the possibilities of what the second season will bring. Move over Game of Thrones, there’s a new sheriff in HBO town.