Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

Maybe a year ago I first heard of an old show called Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman that ran in syndication from 1976 to 1977. I had heard of it because Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden beautifully covered the theme song of the show on their 1977 duo album Soapsuds, Soapsuds. I must have gotten curious about the show and tried to find episodes online. All I could find were some tiny Youtube clips, and I was fascinated by how weird the show seemed.

Long story short, I bought the DVD of the first 25 episodes for my mother on her birthday. It's a selfish gift because now I can finally watch the show. It really blows me away. The characters are very rich and vibrant, and the writing is awesome. Two things in particular really grab me about the show.

First, it's very intentionally a commentary on American society in the mid-70s. I won't go into details about the commentary because I don't want to make an essay out of this. But basically it's fascinating to me because the mid-70s of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman seems to be this time when so much of the contemporary mass-produced and mass-marketed style of consumer culture emerged. The kind of culture in which Folgers produces 17 different kinds of instant coffee to suit the needs of the consumer. The characters on the show try to make sense of and embrace these changes in modes of production and consumption that they are swept up in. (It's just like these days when a show or movie makes a reference to all the new electronic social networking tools like Blackberries, Myspace, Facebook, and Gmail.) There are lots of other themes going on in the show, and many of them I'm probably not catching because I wasn't alive during that era.

Second, it's a very moving show. The characters are all experiencing emotional challenges in their lives, and the writers were unafraid to portray some very heart-breaking and uncomfortable scenes. They let us into the bedrooms at night and into the kitchens in the morning, and we witness a range of intimate human interactions, from the sublime to the depressing. The most heart-breaking character is Mary Hartman herself, who goes through hell trying to get a grip on her decaying relationship with her uncommunicative husband.

And despite the intensity of the subject matter, the show is hilarious. The humor is often irreverent and surreal and plays heavily on the ambiguity of human language. It's almost like a Woody Allen movie or Airplane. It also reminds me of the verbal and cognitive high jinks of Samuel Beckett, but that might be because I've been trudging through his novels Molloy and Malone Dies recently.

From what I've read, it seems that Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman bares certain hallmarks of creator Norman Lear's approach to sitcoms. His shows, which also include All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Good Times, have more of a theatrical production quality, center around richly conceived characters, and exhibit social commentary in the subject matters they address. Lear seems like an interesting creative type.