Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman stands as one of the most audacious experiments in television history, a darkly comic soap opera parody that turned suburban malaise into absurdist art. Created by legendary producer Norman Lear and premiering in January 1976, the series followed the perpetually bewildered title character through an endless cavalcade of domestic disasters in the fictional town of Fernwood, Ohio.
Louise Lasser delivered a masterful performance as Mary, a gingham-clad housewife with pigtails and bangs who lurched wide-eyed through crises that would destroy lesser mortals. Her life was a dystopian fever dream disguised as small-town America: her grandfather was exposed as the Fernwood Flasher, her daughter was kidnapped by a mass murderer who also killed a local family along with their goats and chickens, her husband Tom was impotent with her but somehow contracted a venereal disease during an affair, and through it all, Mary obsessed over the waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor.
The show's brilliance lay in its tonal complexity. Lear designed it as satire, with everything said twice, hence the doubled title, mimicking soap opera conventions while skewering consumer culture and middle-class aspirations. The supporting cast was superb: Mary Kay Place shone as Loretta Haggers, Mary's big-hearted neighbor and aspiring country singer whose real-life album climbed the charts, while Martin Mull played both wife-beating Garth Gimble and his twin brother Barth, a talk show host. Dabney Coleman, Dody Goodman, and Debralee Scott rounded out an ensemble that treated absurdity with complete sincerity.
Network television deemed Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman too controversial for daytime or primetime slots, forcing Lear to pursue an unprecedented syndication strategy. He sold the show station by station at the 1976 NATPE market, with mostly independent stations forming what they called the Mary Hartman Network. The gambit succeeded spectacularly, the series ran five nights a week in thirty-minute episodes, airing after the late news in most markets and producing an astonishing 325 episodes.
Deaths occurred in magnificently bizarre ways: a child evangelist electrocuted in the bathtub, a coach drowning in Mary's chicken soup, impalement on an aluminum Christmas tree. Mary herself suffered a televised nervous breakdown on The David Susskind Show, then found herself delighted to be part of a psychiatric ward's Nielsen ratings family. When Lasser departed in 1977, reportedly from exhaustion, the show was rebranded Forever Fernwood, but it lasted only 26 more weeks without its titular star.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman spawned the talk show parody Fernwood 2 Night and earned placement on TV Guide's Top Cult Shows Ever list. Place won an Emmy for her performance, and the series influenced generations of television that followed. Its legacy endures as proof that television could be simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, absurd and achingly real, a grotesque mirror held up to post-Watergate America's nervous breakdown.
Production Credits
USA / Syndication / 1976-1977
Creators: Ann Marcus, Daniel Gregory Browne, Jerry Adelman, Gail Parent, Norman Lear
Main Characters
Louise Lasser as Mary Hartman
Greg Mullavey as Tom Hartman
Mary Kay Place as Loretta Haggers
Graham Jarvis as Charlie Haggers
Dody Goodman as Martha Larkin Shumway
Debralee Scott as Cathy Shumway
Victor Kilian as Raymond Larkin
Dabney Coleman as Merle Jeeter
Claudia Lamb as Heather Hartman
Marian Mercer as Wanda Rittenhouse / Wanda Jeeter
