Most great TV shows that fail commercially are victims of timing. There’s a whole host of single-camera sitcoms from the ’80s and ’90s that might have flourished had they only debuted in the 2000s, which were friendlier to the format. Later on even shows like 30 Rock ran for seven seasons where Arrested Development ran for only three, because the former had the good fortune of debuting a few years later, on a network that had fewer options. Then, shows like the much-lamented Terriers fall into the category of one FX can keep going, because it can justify the expense via future streaming revenue.
Yet all of that ignores the question of influence. Arrested Development might have been watched by a handful of people when it aired, but enough of them were in the industry that its influence has been felt far and wide. Similarly, the single-camera comedy movement of the 2000s would have been nowhere without the early experimenters in the form who tried to bring something more cinematic to the half-hour network timeslot, which was mostly met with complete audience indifference. TV, like all artistic mediums, is often built off of imitation, off of rebuilding things that didn’t quite work until the audience was accustomed enough to their basic building blocks to embrace them.
Such was the case with He & She, a show so good and so mourned that one of its writers took many of its basic elements and re-appropriated them a few years later for a show that spanned nearly a decade and became one of the most beloved comedies of its time: The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Co-created by Allen Burns, who won a writing Emmy for his work on He & She, the major difference between the two programs was simply timing. Mary Tyler Moore debuted in 1970 on a CBS that was eager to shed its image as a purveyor of lowest common denominator shows with offerings suited to the interests of rural rubes. (Some of those shows, such as Green Acres and The Andy Griffith Show, were terrific, not that it changed opinions within CBS any.) As such, the network was willing to suffer lower ratings for a while to get viewers interested in a creatively promising story of a young, single woman making her way alone in the city, particularly if it starred someone like Mary Tyler Moore.
But He & She debuted in 1967, on a television landscape where CBS was still very much invested in rural-themed sitcoms. Indeed, He & She’s lead-in for the one season it ran was Green Acres itself, and in the years to come, He & She’s major players and creative personnel would frequently blame the show’s failure on the bad timeslot. Yet, it wasn’t as if CBS had a huge number of open timeslots conducive to a witty, urban drama about two young married people who were very obviously having copious amounts of sex (and having a great time with it to boot). It was the number one network on television, but that position was earned by seeing how much the viewing public sparked to The Beverly Hillbillies, then draining every last bit of blood from that particular stone. In fact, with its gently surreal streak, He & She’s only compatible lead-in might have been the show where a pig was a major character.
The major difference between He & She and Mary Tyler Moore on the level of premise was that the former series was about a young married couple, rather than a young single woman. But in most other senses, the shows were quite similar. Time was divided between work and home. The main characters were young, witty, and urbane, and if they were going to have kids, it was a long way down the road. (There’s an off-handed, joking reference to the pill in one episode, one of TV’s very first.) Their careers were going to come first, because, yes, both he and she worked and had good lives in their offices. Jay Sandrich, who directed most of He & She, would later go on to direct two-thirds of Mary Tyler Moore. And when it came to the show’s major supporting character, pompous, self-involved actor Oscar North (Jack Cassidy), Burns would later acknowledge that he took the broad strokes of the character to form the figure who would become Mary Tyler Moore’s Ted Baxter. (To watch Cassidy’s performance today is to assume he’s simply doing a riff on Ted Knight’s work, until you remember that Knight’s series actually came later.) Hell, as blogger Klara Tavakoli Goesche points out, the main living room sets for both He & She and Mary Tyler Moore are basically the same.
Yet, the more viewers watch He & She, the more they see how the things that would later succeed on Mary Tyler Moore weren’t completely in place on the earlier series. At the center of He & She is married couple Dick and Paula Hollister, played by Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Benjamin and Prentiss were married in real life as well, thus providing the show with the hook it would use to try to snag viewers. The problem with projects where real-life couples play fictional couples is often that what’s present in reality doesn’t translate onscreen, and there’s no heat between the actors. He & She had the exact opposite problem: Benjamin and Prentiss had such great, funny, sexy chemistry that it became immediately believable that they would only want to hang out with each other. A couple of episodes in the show’s run try to playfully drive wedges between the characters, but even the writers give up somewhere in the middle of act two in these episodes. Sure, that other girl is cute, the show seems to say, but she’s not Paula. When the two are trying to avoid a friend seeing them go out for the night, the playfulness inherent in their relationship is abundantly evident.
This was both the show’s greatest asset and its greatest weakness. Hanging out with Dick and Paula was endlessly fun, and the two bounced off of each other effortlessly. But it was also impossible to introduce real conflict between them. (One of the few times it works is in an episode where Dick grows a beard, Paula doesn’t like it, and then they almost stop having sex. It turned out withholding it from the audience could work almost as well, but that was likely a path CBS didn’t want to head down.) Therefore, the show leaned extra heavily on the “situation” half of “situation comedy.” Take, for instance, the series’ first episode, in which the couple tries to figure out how to help a Greek immigrant before he’s deported. Mary Tyler Moore could wring real pathos out of its stories, because all of its regular characters were unfulfilled in some way. With Dick and Paula so happy in both their public and private lives, the series had to find its pathos in guest players, and this only occasionally worked and often tipped over into mawkish territory.