‘Lou Grant’

Last Monday [September 25, 2017], “Day One” was interestingly timed for the first day of the new 2017–18 television season. A new season can bring about new and memorable series; ones which have impact; ones which, years after they are no longer in first-run broadcast, are still remembered.

For the month of October 2017, and on Mondays, I will be posting thread topics on the milestone anniversaries of the premieres of past television series. Each has in common a voice on politics and/or having been affected by politics.

First up is Lou Grant. It premiered on CBS on September 20, 1977. It ran for five seasons.

Created by future Oscar winner James L. Brooks (1983’s best picture Terms of Endearment), Allan Burns, and Gene Reynolds, this was the spinoff from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which Edward Asner’s title character left Minneapolis, Minnesota for Los Angeles, California.

The premise was that, at the end of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (with its final episode also 40 years ago, March 19, 1977), every pivotal member of the fictional WJM–TV news station was fired but with exception of the least competent employee—news anchor Ted Baxter. This forced Lou to find other work. And he was offered a new job at the fictional Los Angeles Tribune.

When Lou arrives at the Tribune, his friend and boss Charlie Hume (Mason Adams) surprises him—it is not a low-level job, as Lou expects, but as the publication’s city editor. The paper’s owner, Margaret Pynchon (Nancy Marchand), a widowed character partly a composite of Washington Post’s Katharine Graham, is indifferent as to who Charlie hires. The two reporters are Joe Rossi (Robert Walden) and Billie Newman (Linda Kelsey). (In the first three episodes, Rebecca Balding plays the other reporter, Carla Mardigian. She was replaced by Kelsey in the fourth episode.)

What made me think of Lou Grant was not just its 40th anniversary. Shout Factory began releasing the series on DVD in 2016, one season at a time, usually spanning about three months apart of each other. As of this date, four of its five seasons are now available on DVD.

This was an important drama series. It won the outstanding drama series Emmys in 1979 and 1980. Asner won twice for lead actor. Marchand, who would later give us another iconic supporting character (Livia Soprano, Tony’s mother, on HBO’s The Sopranos), won four Emmys for her work.

Here in 2017, Lou Grant gives insight into why we need journalism and news. This was before the corporations overtook media. This was before our current reality of deregulation and that we now have six companies with ownership and control of what content we receive from mass media.

Below is a YouTube-uploaded video of the pilot (titled “Cophouse”).