I accuse Lear of being a closet scholar. Like most creators with the broad touch necessary for quality-cum-success, he seems sure enough of his own originality not to hesitate to steal from past masters. His earlier shows, still running, reflect this. The Jeffersons's black bourgeois dry cleaner … is "movin' on up" so nearly in the footsteps of Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, that it is hard to believe that Lear has not been rereading the Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Further-more, both Jefferson and his white counterpart, Archie Bunker, of Lear's All in the Family, are typically Molièresque central figures: authoritarian male family heads, narrow-minded and covertly decentish in their willful ignorance. (p. 157)

[Each] of these shows is classical in that the laughter results from discrepant human engagements with an implicit moral norm, which norm is (usually too blandly) re-established by the end of each episode after a (usually too even-handed) degree of social criticism and topical commentary along the way.

But Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is different. It is not classical. It is dark and it is grim, even though millions of people watch and laugh. There is no norm, and Lear avoids restorative climaxes simply by seeing to it that there are no climaxes at all. Instead of a discrete half-hour unit per week of continuing characters but new episodes, he's running a relentless narrative that is always promising resolutions and conclusions that absolutely never arrive. As a compound of the situation comedy and soap-opera genres, with their respective modes of sensibility, Mary Hartman becomes a genre unto itself, which—like the novel at its beginnings—permits fresh art to exercise itself where it could not do so within an older rigidified convention. Thus, good as some of the other sitcoms are, they are becoming as formal as the sonnet, with only fine ensemble acting to permit them life.

To illustrate what I mean about there being no norm, only a dreadful abyss: the recent season's concluding episode left Mary on the edge of her daily nervous breakdown, this time in New York where, selected as America's Typical Consumer Housewife, she is about to go on the David Susskind Show. ("But I'm separated from my husband and my daughter hates me." "That's great. According to our statistics that puts you right in line for the title.") Mary wanders into F.A.O. Schwarz and asks the price of a big doll's house there on display. When told it's not for sale she insists hysterically that she must have it, with each little doll, every chair, table, plate, knife, fork perfectly in its proper place. She desperately craves a norm. But it is not a norm, this doll's house interior; it cannot be had. The point is that Mary is insane to keep on insisting it can be had, when it's only a display item in the greatest toy store in the world.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is recognizable as a Norman Lear production in that it too displays plenty of creative "stealing." I repeat my closet scholar accusation, with further specifications: Lear has read Flaubert on received ideas, heard Chekhov's characters talk self-absorbedly past one another in comic-tragic scenes depicting the fatal erosion of a society too removed from the most ordinary truths, applied and even developed Marx's concept of alienation. He's had the nerve to exploit these systematically in a tough mass market not only because he has sensed that this may be where we are at but also because he believes that we have sensed that this may be where we are at: in no-norm's-land. (pp. 157-58)

He gets to say his fine things but he never insists: delighted if audiences are simply laughing and/or crying, he won't complain ungratefully, like Shaw, that he's not being taken seriously….

TV people have begun to realize that there is a blue-collar class out there, 65 million strong, with frustrations, hidden injuries…. But Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is the first and only working-class soap opera to come to grips with blue-collar frustrations and despairs….

Incidentally, there is no show which so insightfully and deliberately depicts TV itself as an important part of the lives of people. During a mass murder right down the block, showing live on TV, Mary frets over the "waxy yellow build-up" on her kitchen floor, unable to distinguish between the news and the commercials. Such off-the-point reactions are a staple feature of the show, akin to Lear's Chekhovian dialogue, and Marxist in their underlying sense of the anatomy of alienation possible in a large-scale capitalist society….

[Extraneous] ideas have a more compelling place in Mary's brutally one-dimensional existence than either desire or fidelity, kindness or venality. Yet—and this is the sweet and terrible pathos of Lear—we know that, steam-rollered as she is, Mary has plenty of frantic desire, fidelity, kindness, venality.

Lear's Marxism has to do with the notion of man's alienation through certain kinds of work. Tom, screwing in the dome lights for which he can have no feeling, is unable to touch his wife, for whom he has a kind of drowned but real feeling. Lear sees virtually everything in our culture—even and especially that which is most intrinsically valuable—being ground up into a commodity to be packaged and sold, regardless of need or real appetite, and he is busy depicting the manifold extensions of this fact. The goods must be moved off the shelf, and no matter whether or how they are absorbed. The cups of instant coffee are gobbled up by people who may at bottom legitimately desire to sleep, not stay awake. The people who do not love nor wish to love buy paperbacks on how to love and study them hard. The chicken soup is slurped up by men who have been told it is good for them; the fact that they may be drowning in the stuff is incidental to the system, since they are incidental.

These monster manufacturers are constantly rising up in Lear's show. But his best general insight is that, more damaging than the possibly useful and quite efficient household appliances, waxes, polishes and foodstuffs; are the ideas, originally of value, but now ground up, packaged, purveyed, swallowed and scarcely digested. We are the most sophisticated people in the world, even those of us who live in Fernwood, yet we know nothing; we are intolerably burdened with ideas, a most heavy baggage, without even a rudimentary sense of their use….

For the genial Lear it's no joke. He likes his characters. He hates what has happened to them and in an ironic way this forces him to end up with distaste for the characters he likes. It is a bitter, bitter business—so much so that I will no longer watch Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. (p. 158)