Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

Last updated
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman title.png
Title card
Created by
Developed by Norman Lear
Starring
Theme music composerBarry White
Opening theme"Premiere Occasion"
Composer Earle Hagen
Country of originUnited States
No. of seasons2
No. of episodes325
Production
ProducerViva Knight
Running time23 minutes
Production companies Filmways
T.A.T. Communications Company
Original release
Network Syndicated
ReleaseJanuary 5, 1976 (1976-01-05) 
July 1, 1977 (1977-07-01)

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is an American satirical soap opera that was broadcast on weeknights from January 1976 to July 1977. The syndicated series follows the eponymous Mary Hartman, a small-town Ohio housewife attempting to cope with various bizarre and sometimes violent incidents occurring in her daily life. The series was produced by Norman Lear, directed by Joan Darling, Jim Drake, Nessa Hyams, and Giovanna Nigro, and starred Louise Lasser, Greg Mullavey, Dody Goodman, Norman Alden, Mary Kay Place, Graham Jarvis, Debralee Scott, and Victor Kilian. The series writers were Gail Parent and Ann Marcus. [1]

Contents

Developed by Lear with the intention of examining the effects of consumerism on the American housewife, the series was filmed at KTLA Studios in Los Angeles. The show's title, featuring the title character's name stated twice, is a reference to Lear's observation that soap opera dialogue tended to be repeated.

In 2004 and 2007, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was ranked number 21 and number 26 respectively on "TV Guide's Top Cult Shows Ever." [2] [3]

TV Guide ranked the death of Coach Leroy Fedders, who drowns in a bowl of Mary's chicken soup in the first season, 97th on its list of the 100 Greatest T.V. Moments of All Time. [4]

Premise

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman follows the eponymous character through increasingly complex and compounding life events and scenarios often reflective of the changing social fabric of 1970s. Some of her key traits, unusual but prescient for the times, include her initially numbed-out response to both external and emotional conflicts, her indecisiveness, and her potential to suddenly snap out of one state of mind and swing to its opposite. Moral quandaries frequently seem on the verge of vanishing into apathy, until she is reminded of her love for her family and the need to keep them together. The show's convoluted plots and tongue-in-cheek melodrama lampooned the soap opera format similar to Soap and later, Twin Peaks .

In the first episode, Mary Hartman introduces the Lombardi family of five, all of whom, along with their two goats and eight chickens, have been murdered by young Davey Jessup, an event witnessed by both Mary's daughter, Heather, and the "Fernwood Flasher", who is revealed to be Mary's grandfather, Raymond Larkin. Other characters also die in bizarre ways, including electrocution in a bathtub (Jimmy Joe Jeeter), drowning in chicken soup (Coach Leroy Fedders), and being impaled on a pink bottle brush artificial Christmas tree (Garth Gimble).

Mary Hartman had a nationally televised nervous breakdown on The David Susskind Show at the end of the first season. She then found herself in a psychiatric ward, where she was delighted to be part of their selected Nielsen ratings "family". [5] One of her sanitarium mates, widowed Wanda Rittenhouse (Marian Mercer), became more prominent later, when she married Merle Jeeter, the mayor of Fernwood. [6]

Cast

Main cast

Supporting cast

History and production

In December 1974, Norman Lear and his entertainment company, Tandem Productions, created a pilot for his new serial, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a satire of the impact of American consumerism. [8] The pilot, consisting of two episodes and shot on a $100,000 (equal to $617,814 today) budget, [8] was not picked up by the networks.

Lear then pursued a syndication strategy by hiring a sales agent to sell the show at the 1976 National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) market in San Francisco. The mostly independent stations that picked up the show began calling themselves the Mary Hartman Network. [5] KING-TV of Seattle became the first station to procure syndication rights to Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.[ citation needed ]

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was filmed at KTLA Studios in Los Angeles. [9]

Music

The theme song, "Premiere Occasion", was selected from the stock music library Southern Library of Recorded Music. It was written by British composer Robert Charles Kingston under the pseudonym Barry White and copyrighted in 1965, 10 years before Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman first aired, lending the illusion of a soap opera that already had a long history. [10] Incidental music for the series was mostly written by Earle Hagen. [11]

As country and western singer-songwriter Loretta Haggers, Mary Kay Place sang a number of songs over the course of the series. Place wrote some of those songs herself, including "Baby Boy" and "Vitamin L", both of which were issued as singles by Columbia Records in 1976. [12] "Baby Boy" was a minor hit for Loretta Haggers in the series, which she played to a nationwide audience live on the set of Dinah! in one episode, [13] as well as a minor hit for Place, spending 13 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and peaking at No. 60. [14] Place also released a full album of Loretta Haggers's music, Tonite! At the Capri Lounge Loretta Haggers. [15]

Several songs have been written about Mary Hartman, many of them incorporating elements of the theme song. All-woman rock group The Deadly Nightshade's disco-flavored "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (Theme)" reached No. 79 on the Hot 100, [16] and at least four other Mary Hartman-related disco songs were released by Vincent Montana Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., Floyd Cramer, and The Marketts during the show's run. [17] [18] [19] [20]

In 1976, Lasser was arrested at a Los Angeles charity boutique. Police found $6 worth (or 88 milligrams) of cocaine in her purse. Authorities were called after Lasser's American Express card was denied and she refused to leave without possession of a $150 dollhouse. Lasser was initially apprehended for two unpaid traffic tickets (one for jaywalking), but the officers then found the cocaine in her handbag. She claimed a fan had given her the drug several months earlier. Lasser was ordered to six months in counseling, which was easily satisfied as she was already seeing an analyst. [21] A fictionalized version of Lasser's refusal to leave a store without a dollhouse was incorporated into Mary Hartman's first season. [22]

Legacy

In 1976, Ted Morgan wrote in The New York Times : "The dreams and nightmares of the American people are reflected darkly through the glass of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman." [23] "No longer merely a television program, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman has become a cultural event, in the same league as those other sociological signposts that culture watchers [...] are always on the lookout for to help us explain ourselves." [1]

Of the series' influence on pop culture, Claire Barliant wrote: "For some, the 1970s [...] was a descent into chaos, a dissolution of self, but also a kind of awakening [...] The seventies nervous breakdown coincides with women's lib and a strengthening gay rights movement [...] MH2 is relevant today because it entertains but still shocks, because the social commentary and satire and bravery of the show are as fresh as ever." [1]

In 2000, Lasser appeared on a panel with her former MH2 cast and crew members at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills for a seminar, "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman: Reunion, Reunion". The panel was moderated by Steven A. Bell and recorded for the museum archives. [23]

In 2004 and 2007, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was ranked number 21 and number 26 on "TV Guide's Top Cult Shows Ever." [2] [3]

Forever Fernwood

When Lasser left the show in 1977, it was rebranded Forever Fernwood and followed the trials and tribulations of Mary's family and friends after she had run away with police sergeant Dennis Foley, with whom she had had a lot of contact during the first season. Aside from Lasser, the rest of the cast remained intact even as new actors joined the cast: Shelley Fabares as Eleanor Major, who began dating Tom after Mary had left him; Judith Kahan as Eleanor's stuttering sister, Penny Major; and Randall Carver as Cathy Shumway's gangster husband, Jeffrey DeVito. [24] [25] On the last episode of the series, Penny married Tom Hartman. Forever Fernwood ended in 1978, after 26 weeks on the air (130 half-hour episodes).

Spin-offs

During the summer of 1977, Fernwood 2 Night , a local talk show satire and parody starring Martin Mull as Barth Gimble, was broadcast as a spin-off/summer replacement for Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. For the following season, the show was slightly revamped and broadcast "nationwide" via the fictional UBS network as America 2-Night in the spring of 1978.

Planned reboot

In February 2021, it was reported that a reboot of the series was in development by Sony Pictures Television with Emily Hampshire as writer and starring role, Jacob Tierney as co-writer, and Lear and Brent Miller as executive producers. [26] In July 2021, it was announced that TBS had given a series order. [27] In April 2022, it was announced the series was scrapped alongside all scripted programming on TBS. [28] Lear later sought to revive the project, and was working on developing the reboot until shortly before his death in 2023. [29]

The show was parodied several times during its run:

Home video

VHS

DVD

On March 27, 2007, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman Volume One on DVD in Region 1. [39] The three-disc boxset features the first 25 episodes of Season 1, dealing with the Fernwood Flasher and Lombardi massacre storylines. Many of the episodes were the syndication versions, heavily edited to fit more commercials in the broadcasts, due to cost issues when about to remaster and transfer the original broadcast versions.

On August 28, 2013, it was announced that Shout! Factory had acquired the rights to the series and released Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman: The Complete Series on DVD in Region 1 on December 3, 2013. [40] The 38-disc set features all 325 episodes. The Season 1 episodes were restored to their full-length broadcast versions and other bonus features, such as interviews with Lear, Lasser, and Place, are included. [41]

Syndication

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was syndicated on local stations briefly in 1982 and later broadcast on Lifetime Television in 1994 and TV Land in 2002. [42]

See also

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References

Notes

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  2. 1 2 "TV Guide's 25 Top Cult Shows – TannerWorld Junction". TannerWorld Junction. May 26, 2004. Archived from the original on January 4, 2009.
  3. 1 2 "TV Guide Names the Top Cult Shows Ever – Today's News: Our Take". TV Guide. TV Guide. June 29, 2007.
  4. "TV's Top 100 Episodes of All Time". TV Guide. June 15, 2009. pp. 34–49.
  5. 1 2 Miller, Taylor Cole (2017). "Chapter 2: Rewriting Genesis: Queering Genre in Norman Lear's First-Run Syndicated Serials". Syndicated Queerness: Television Talk Shows, Rerun Syndication, and the Serials of Norman Lear (PhD). University of Wisconsin–Madison.
  6. "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman". Sony Pictures TV. Retrieved July 13, 2024.
  7. Lentz, Harris (June 3, 2019). Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2018. McFarland. p. 167. ISBN   9781476670331 via Google Books.
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  16. "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman". Billboard. Accessed 17 June 2019.
  17. "Sounds of Inner City Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman". Discogs. Accessed 17 June 2019.
  18. "Sammy Davis Jr The Song and Dance Man". Discogs. Accessed 17 June 2019.
  19. "Floyd Cramer & The Keyboard Kick Band Floyd Cramer & The Keyboard Kick Band". Discogs. Accessed 25 September 2019.
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  27. Andreeva, Nellie (July 27, 2021). "'Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman' Remake Starring Emily Hampshire Lands At TBS On Norman Lear's 99th Birthday". Deadline Hollywood . Retrieved July 28, 2021.
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Further reading