The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which aired on CBS from 1970 to 1977, broke ground for women on TV, with Mary Tyler Moore playing an unmarried woman more focused on her career in a Minneapolis newsroom than on her love life or a partner.
“Mary Richards was not TV’s first working woman, or its first woman on her own,” Linda Holmes, host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, observed after Moore’s death on January 25, 2017. “But before Mary, if you saw a woman without a partner at the center of a TV comedy, she was probably a widow. … Mary didn’t have a living husband, a dead husband, an ex-husband, or even a permanent boyfriend like Marlo Thomas did on That Girl.”