Mary Tyler Moore: the greatest woman TV star ever

Mary Tyler Moore, who died Wednesday at the age of 80, did something no one else ever did in the history of television: She starred in two landmark sitcoms playing two very different characters.

She would be granted a share of immortality if she had only been just Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or Mary Richards on “Mary Tyler Moore.” But to have been both Laura and Mary?

Unprecedented then, and 40 years after the final episode of “Mary Tyler Moore,” still unprecedented.

They weren’t just great shows. They also captured lightning in a bottle and remain signature sociological documents of their time. Watching them now gives you a profound sense of the America from which they came.

Both of Moore’s characters epitomized the white American upper middle class at the time she was playing them.

She was the glamorous American suburban mom at the beginning of the 1960s on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and she was the rising American single career woman on her own eponymous show at the end of that decade, and well into the 1970s.

Here’s what made her so special in both shows: She was gorgeous, and she was five seconds away from a nervous breakdown. Laura wasn’t the calm, wondrous center of the American hearth and home, like other TV moms of the day — Donna Reed, say, or Barbara Billingsley on “Leave It To Beaver.”

Laura was young, brittle, surprisingly humorless, oddly intimidating and always a bit unsatisfied. She made mistakes and Rob, her husband, paid for them — like when she revealed to a reviewer that his vain TV-star boss was bald and wore a hairpiece.

She cried more than she smiled, and her hilarious whiny invocation of her husband’s name — “Roooobbbbbbbb” — always signified trouble ahead.

For the first time in the medium’s young history, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” offered a portrait of a marriage that was neither idealized nor caricatured. And the key was Mary Tyler Moore, whose portrayal of Laura now seems entirely awash in the “problem that has no name,” diagnosed by Betty Friedan in her pioneering 1963 tract about the woes of suburban housewives, “The Feminine Mystique.”

A more confident, more mature, more rational Moore arrived on the scene in 1969 in the show that bore her name — and that changed television forever. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was the first television program centering on a woman that did not take place in the home.

She had many boyfriends, and it is clearly suggested she was not abstemious when it came to sex, but the pursuit of marriage and children wasn’t the object of her life. No, Mary’s home was her office.

Moore had become for her own show what Van Dyke’s Rob Petrie was on his — the sane center around which a bunch of crazies revolved.

And yet even here she wasn’t all that sane. Mary was easily shocked, quickly offended, never far from utter exasperation. Things never quite worked out for her. Every party she tried to throw was a disaster. Every innovation she attempted on the evening news show for which she worked went awry.

And in the classic episode called “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” Moore finally and indelibly burst out into true comic mania.

When her TV station’s kid-show clown is killed in a freak accident involving an elephant, she’s horrified by the mordant sick jokes told at his expense by her colleagues. Her self-righteous indignation is turned on its head at the episode’s astounding climax.

When she listens to the all-too-serious minister at the funeral invoke the names of the characters Chuckles played (Mr. Fee Fi Fo) and his catchphrase (“a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in your pants”), Mary starts to giggle and, as the assembled look on in horror, erupts into gales of laughter at the most inappropriate time.

It is without question the single greatest sitcom episode, and Moore’s turn in it may be the greatest single sitcom performance. Indeed, in embodying both Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, Mary Tyler Moore enshrined herself as the greatest female star the television medium had seen up to that point — and up to now.