Celebrity documentaries often dig up old talk show footage, and early in HBO’s “Being Mary Tyler Moore” we see her interviewed by David Susskind. The exchange reveals both the host’s stubborn assumptions about gender roles and Moore’s polite disinterest in pandering to his line of questioning.
The clip is from 1966, just as “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was drawing to a close. The sitcom made Moore a star playing Laura Petrie, and in Susskind’s estimation, the character is an “idealization of the American wife.” Then he pontificates, just generally, on what he sees as the sad state of matrimony in real life: Walk into any restaurant and “the woman is yakking like crazy and the man has a hurt, bored expression.”
What he fails to realize is that he’s creating that very dynamic in the television studio — except he is the one yakking like crazy while his guest has a hurt, bored expression. He thinks women are only “half-married” if they work outside the home. She gently but firmly pushes back. “Women should be human beings first, women second, and wives and mothers third,” she tells him. “It should fall in that order.”
