When I was a little kid we watched
The Mary Tyler Moore Show every week and I thought it was great. So funny. Then it ended and there was a new show about Lou Grant. I was about 7 years old. And then I saw it was not a comedy! I'd never heard of such a thing. And not only not a comedy, but there were no murders to solve or car chases, either. It was about adults working together and adults dealing with adult topics of the day. And I thought, what a waste, to take this great sitcom character and put him on this boring show.
Then at some point, probably in the summer because I could stay up later, I watched a whole
Lou Grant. And it was the most interesting show I had ever seen. They were talking about issues of media ethics and women in the workplace and extremist groups and civil rights and homelessness and domestic abuse and on and on. I didn't know much about these issues, but it was a real eye-opener to me, that there could be a TV show like that. I started to look forward to Monday nights at 9, and the intro that started with a little bird in a tree and followed the tree as it was turned into a newspaper.
I watched the whole
Lou Grant series again a few years ago, and it has really held up well. The entire cast was great. Mrs. Pynchon was not as scary as I thought she was when I was a kid. It was interesting that on the sitcom Asner played Lou more grumpy, and on the drama he played him more good-humored.
Asner was also a labor man, a union leader and an unabashed liberal. In the early days of the "Reagan Revolution," there were plenty of people ready to call any criticism of US policy "un-American." Where I lived, Ed Asner was openly hated. Kids at school were bad mouthing him (repeating what they heard from parents) because he had dared to criticize US intervention in Central America. I remember this clearly, and it ticked me off because I knew they didn't watch the show or have any idea how good it was. But he never cared, and certainly never apologized. He thought his outspokenness got
Lou Grant canceled. I don't know, but I certainly believe it was possible. There were definitely organized calls to boycott CBS because of Asner's politics.
For a long time I thought Ed Asner was older than he was, because Lou Grant was a WW2 veteran and I associated that with someone my grandpa's age, born in the 19-teens or early '20s. When The MTM Show premiered, he was only 40 years old (Lou was established as 45 in season one). I always enjoyed seeing him in anything, and admired him as a person. The last time I saw his name in the news, just within the past year, he was suing the union that he formerly headed over cuts they had made to members' medical benefits. He never gave up on what he believed.
(He talks about the
Lou Grant cancellation here)
