"The Mary Tyler Moore Show," the sitcom that made housewife shows look old hat

It's curious that in France the name Lou Grant vaguely rings a bell, while that of Mary Richards doesn't. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was never broadcast on our screens, unlike its male spin-off, which we briefly saw in the mid-1980s. This is ironic, considering the immense contribution to television that the sitcom created in 1970 by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns made, commissioned by Mary Tyler Moore and her husband, Grant Tinker, for their production company, MTM, and the CBS network.

In the pages of Le Monde , only a post by Claude Sarraute, published in 1977 and entitled "The Suffragettes of the Small Screen," gives an idea of the importance that the series had across the Atlantic. "Curious, this phenomenon that we are witnessing in the United States, this real dichotomy (...) between the big and small screen. On one, everything is inscribed in the masculine, and on the other - this is less well known - in the feminine," writes the journalist. Broadcast for the first time in July 1970, the sitcom and its iconic opening theme - the heroine throws her beret in the air with joy while Sonny Curtis sings " you're gonna make it after all" - immediately made all the housewives of the previous decade look old-fashioned.

The pilot of the series, with its unprecedented modernity, is a program in itself. We meet Mary Richards, 30 years old and single. Originally, the creators had imagined her as a young divorcee, to correspond to the reality of the time – divorces had been exploding since the early 1960s –, but CBS didn't follow. The young woman has just left New York for Minneapolis (Minnesota), where she lands a job as a junior producer at a local news channel. In the same episode, she definitively fires her ex-fiancé who came to win her back, in a scene that has become famous. "Take care of yourself," he tells her before leaving. "I think that's what I just did," she replies. Mary's self-confessed singlehood may sometimes weigh on her – she will have her share of romantic disappointments and will confess her fatigue after "twenty years of dating and... 2,000 dates (...) , 90% of which were really rotten!" – it will become a guiding principle of the sitcom, to the point of scuppering a potential relationship with Lou, her boss, at the end of season 7.

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