Now the Grim Reaper has taken Mary Richards?

A Valentine to the late, great Mary Tyler Moore

Embarrassment is a notoriously difficult subject to dramatize. Mary Tyler Moore and the other creators of The Mary Tyler Moore Show made it their specialty. Maybe thats what drew us in, the fact that Mary Tyler Moore, with her dancers poise and patrician bone structure, could be so convincing as someone skittish or awkward. She gave neurosis a loopy dignity.

Yes, Mary Tyler Moore was a thoroughly modern woman, but her namesake show dared to hint at the deeper anxieties women in the workplace were beginning to face. In that way, she was really our avatar. And she wore beige pumps with everything, paving the way for Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, who is perhaps her most likely inheritor. Kate and Mary share the bouncy hair, the coltish physique, and a cheery efficiency that would seem Midwestern, if it didnt belong to the Midlands, too. Things seemed better when Mary was around. (Same with Kate.)

Its bad enough that the world now seems in the throes of a diabolical baby. That Mary, a kind of sainted everywoman, is gone confirms that Armageddon is just a station break away.

The character Mary played wasnt exactly an original. She belonged to a long line of spunky sisters, with some of the pluckiness of Louisa May Alcotts Jo. She had the moral decency, the plain level-headedness, of Jane Austens Elizabeth Bennett. She was the still center, the Dorothea Brooke, of the news room, her Middlemarch.

Mary herself would probably blush or wave her hand or go Aw shucks if she knew wed subjected her to serious analysis. She wasnt a thinker; she was a producer, on the show and behind the scenes. When her character goes home at night, we never see her reading a book. (Were there even books on the shelves of her credenza?) Shed rather curl up on the sofa with her needlepoint. That was one of the most brilliant aspects of her conception: its her very ordinariness that makes her spectacular. Her character, Mary Richards, was Wonder Woman tricked up as the girl-next-door. Mary (and perhaps Kate too?) have the heightened everygirl-ishness that most men overlook. (Even Prince William claims not to have noticed how attractive Kate was until he saw her modelling lingerie.) These women have everything except the mythic quality men think they want. If theyre lucky, most men end up marrying a Mary. They just dont know it. They think shes not extraordinary enough to fall in love with, until they do.

When I was growing up, one of the most puzzling things about The Mary Tyler Moore Show (other than that opening credit sequence: why was she throwing her hat in the air?) was the central dilemma suggested by her name. Would Mary marry? When would she put away her rollaway bed and climb into the sack with a real man? That Mary seemed desirable at all was already revolutionary. Lucille Ball was gorgeous, but no one would have known that back then, she was such a Gumby-like chameleon. Marys womanliness was a reproach to the looniness of Lucy, to the madcap ingnue Marlo Thomas played.

But Mary refused to marry the first good-looking guest star who came along, or the second or the third. She had principles. She had spine. Her singleness, even as the actress aged well past the mark most television shows would have deemed acceptableat the time, there was very little bandwidth between swinging single and dowagerwas one of the marvelous dividends of her behind-the-scenes power. Her freedom to mature was as resounding a rebuke as the door Ibsens Nora slammed.

Our Mary wasnt a door slammer. She didnt even laugh loudly (except when Chuckles the Clown died). For sass, we had Rhoda, whose name is practically an anagram for irony. She was, as Diane Keaton says in Annie Hall (Annie could have been Marys sorority sister), what Grammy would call a real Jew. For those of us who were real Jews, it was a shock and a thrill to see ourselves represented, even if Rhoda, at least initially, was kind of schlumpy. At least she was arty, too.

Mary wasnt an artist. She was more of a den mother, and never has a supporting cast boasted so many delicious star turns. The kookiness of her co-workers gives Mary Richards some ineffable quality or complication, as if to confirm something unusual in her. None of her granite-jawed romantic partners had nearly as much pizazz. No wonder Mary concludes each date with a chaste kiss at the door of her studio apartment, as if the network prohibition against Rob and Laura Petrie sharing a bed meant Mary Richards had to sleep alone too. Strangely, even in her baby doll pajamas Mary doesnt seem particularly sexy. It wouldnt be the Midwest if she was.

When Mary Tyler Moore played the icy, broken-hearted mother in Ordinary People (her only Oscar nomination), the role seemed like an extension of the earlier Mary, as if her gamine charm had hardened into something caustic and brittle; despair, with an onyx-like gleam. That could have happened to Mary Richards, if one of those innumerable dates didnt eventually work out. But they never seemed to, which only confirms that the real love affair was between MTM and her audience. She was just eccentric enough, just conventional enough, just smart enough, to keep us in her thrall.

That extended romance may have been the last time the blue and red states were genuinely in agreement.

That Donald Trump reigns and Mary Richards is gone just confirms how very wrong the world order is right now.