Mary Tyler Moore Couldn’t Land CBS Sitcom Until Dick Van Dyke Lent Her a Helping Hand

Mary Tyler Moore “had gone from being the most popular woman in America to being a has-been in three, four years,” according to Dick Van Dyke Show producer Bill Persky in the documentary Being Mary Tyler Moore. After the sitcom’s cancellation in 1966, Moore couldn’t find a successful vehicle for her talents, in part because she was stuck in the collective consciousness as Laura Petrie. 

Stage and film projects were unsuccessful. And “when the show was over, I could tell the network just saw her as the wife who supported,” said Dick Van Dyke this week on Ted Danson’s Where Everyone Knows Your Name podcast. “She wasn’t getting anything from the network.”

But Van Dyke still had a deal with CBS for a series of one-hour specials. Persky pitched the comic actor on a reunion show, both for ratings and “because I think Mary could use it.” 

The special, Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, turned into a showcase for Moore to display her many, non-Laura Petrie talents. She could play angry or sultry or independent, traits viewers rarely got to see on The Dick Van Dyke Show. The title of the special suggested an adulterous affair — whoa! — even though Van Dyke and Moore assured the audience that there was nothing unsavory about their real-life relationship. “They gave me a wonderful opportunity to sing and dance and clown,” Moore remembered. 

Ratings for the special went through the roof, landing on the cover of TV Guide. Television viewers, noted Persky “rediscovered Mary Tyler Moore.”  

And so did the network. “CBS noted how successful it was,” Moore said.

“She just blew the place away,” Van Dyke told Danson. “The next day they called her.” 

“And they asked me if I wanted to do my own show,” says Moore, “to which I said yes.”

Moore called her friend Beverly Sanders, screaming into the phone with joy. “Of course she got her break,” Sanders remembered. “For Mary to step off that show and into The Mary Tyler Moore Show was really something.”

Without Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, it’s likely the doofuses at CBS would have missed out on a sitcom that was nominated for 67 Primetime Emmy Awards, winning 29. Moore took home four of the trophies for her portrayal of Mary Richards, one of the first unmarried professional women to be depicted on network TV.

“The network, you gotta nudge ‘em a little bit,” Van Dyke says. “They didn’t get it that she was great.”