Marcin Wichary launched a new blog about "software craft and quality" last month and it's excellent #

The great thing about YouTube is that it’s full of unusual clips of TV programmes which used to be difficult or impossible to see any other way. The less great thing about YouTube: often, these clips are given little or no context.

With that in mind: what exactly is the following, ostensibly from The Mary Tyler Moore Show?

Let’s list the oddities. After the CBS fall branding, and into the Mary clip proper:

• It starts off with a different, rather more relaxed mix of the theme tune than appears in Season 1 of the show. It also has different lyrics, with the line “girl you’ll be so far from home” instead of “girl this time you’re all alone”.¹
• The visuals of the title sequence are mainly the same as Season 1, but there are some alternate shots which go unused in the final show.
• This is followed by location footage of Mary leaving her house which never appears in the show proper either, along with a most atypical voiceover.
• Finally, the actual scene itself is the famous first encounter between Mary Richards and Lou Grant, a version of which does appear in the opening episode of the show. But it’s not merely a different take – it takes place on an entirely different set to the broadcast episode.

What’s going on?

Luckily, the answer is already out there, if you know where to look: The Making of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a 2002 documentary on the Season 1 DVD release of the programme. It is at times a slightly infuriating watch², but gives us exactly what we need. A whole five minute section of the doc is dedicated to what they call “The Presentation”.

I won’t quote the entire thing; below are the most interesting snippets.³

MARY TYLER MOORE: CBS asked us, since we had no pilot, if we would just film a little scene, so they could send that to all their affiliates, so they could commit to being on-board with the network.
ALLAN BURNS: Just a teaser, to give them an idea of what the show was going to be about. And we took our favourite scene out of the show – we weren’t wrong about that – which was the scene where Mary is interviewed for the job by Ed. And we shot it on a little commercial stage on La Brea Avenue.

Well that explains that – and also explains the context of the fall branding at the start of the clip. I’m sure everyone was delighted with the end result, right?

ALLAN BURNS: Jay Sandrich directed it, and it was terrible.

Oh dear.

JAY SANDRICH: I’m putting this nicely – I have no idea who the cameraman was, but he really didn’t understand how to light Mary. So number 1, it looked terrible. And number 2, we never rehearsed.
DAVID DAVIS: We didn’t have a set then, nothing was really designed, so they kind of put together three walls…
ED ASNER: The room was cramped, I felt very stiff, I don’t know how Mary felt…
ETHEL WINANT: It just didn’t work very well. Didn’t work at all, frankly.
ALLAN BURNS: If you look at the material in the presentation, it is all within the show that they ultimately shot.
DAVID DAVIS: The problem was that there was no audience, and it was single camera. So no matter how much you try, you cannot duplicate the sound quality, the energy quality, the mood, the whole feeling of a multi-camera show, that’s why we do it in front of an audience.⁴

All of which explains why the Fall Preview looks and feels very different to the version of the scene we see in the final show.

Some of the biggest reservations were regarding Ed Asner’s performance:

JAY SANDRICH: Ed was a wonderful dramatic actor… hadn’t done comedy in a while. And he was playing the scene from my point of view a little too dramatic, and not fast enough, not paced up enough. So we really disliked each other. You know, Mary walked in, and she pretty well knew how to play the scene. So most of the time pressure was trying to get Ed, from my point of view, to just pace it up and not play it quite so dramatically.
ALLAN BURNS: After shooting it, we got a visit or a call from Perry Lafferty, who was head of CBS West Coast, saying ‘Guys, you know what, Ed Asner is a wonderful, wonderful dramatic actor. Dramatic actor. And that was supposed to be our hint to say: ‘You’re right, let’s recast’.
ETHEL WINANT: The network guys looked at it, and that’s when everything hit the fan. They called me in and said ‘You have to fire him’. I said ‘I will not fire him. I will admit it’s a terrible scene. I mean, I looked at it and oh God, it really is terrible. But it’s not fair. It’s like nobody had gotten up in the morning, nobody had brushed their teeth. Nobody had done anything, they just did it.’

I don’t really think Ed Asner is that terrible here, although he’s obviously far, far better in the final show. What’s almost more of a problem is the lack of close-up when he delivers the famous line: “I hate spunk!”⁵ Maybe Ed isn’t quite selling the line right, but the direction sure isn’t helping him either.

Regardless, while this presentation may well have been intended mainly for internal use by affiliates, it was also broadcast by at least some of them. The Washington Daily News has it scheduled on WTOP-9 on Saturday 8th August 1970 at 7:30⁶, and details the contents of the full half-hour programme:

“CBS Fall Preview (7:30 – 8, Channel 9) offers a look at the new and old shows to be offered during the 1970-71 season on CBS. Among the new programmes previewed are: “Headmaster,” a situation comedy starring Andy Griffith; “The Storefront Lawyers,” concerning three young lawyers serving the under-represented; “The Interns,” focusing on the personal lives of a small group of youth doctors. Also previewed: the new Tim (“McHale’s Navy”) Conway variety series; the Mary Tyler Moore show⁷ and some of the feature films to be aired on the network’s two prime-time movie showcases.”

Which means: this test scene which everyone who worked on the show hated, and felt contained a dreadful performance by one of the show’s leads, was the very first look the general public got of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

That’s showbusiness.

With thanks to Tanya Jones.

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1. I understand why they went more energetic for the theme in the end, but I really love this version in its own right. ↩

2. There is incidental musak – and I use that term advisedly – across the entire hour-and-a-half runtime, and I honestly can’t fathom why anybody would make that particular production decision. What is merely annoying after a few minutes is truly obnoxious by the time you get to the end. ↩

3. All of the interviews I quote in this article I have lightly edited and removed lines, but I don’t believe I materially affect anybody’s meaning. ↩

4. In two lines, David Davis here sums up exactly why I love audience sitcom, and why I struggle with so much single camera comedy today. ↩

5. This line is so funny in its own right, that crap jokes regarding what this means in British slang just don’t really register in my head. ↩

6. Sadly, the entire half hour preview seems difficult to find online, although various segments other than the Moore one are also on YouTube. ↩

7. Capitalisation as per the original newspaper column. ↩

There is a character on my World of Warcraft account I have basically never played and yet refuse to delete. Why? Because his name is Grignr. If you don’t understand why that matters, just be assured that people who do understand why that matters no doubt agree that you can’t get rid of him because his name is […]

When Slovakian builder brianbrickster first started sharing medieval LEGO creations, the stonework and siege weapons were impressive. Over the years, with skills honed in the trials of Brickscalibur and the Summer Joust, Brian has become a true artist of castle creations. His latest is a breathtaking display of forced perspective. The transition from minifig to microscale is miraculous. The brick-built sky gives the immersive scene the air of a painting.

Speaking of paintings, Brian has played with perspective before. Created for 2024’s Summer Joust, here the builder creates a whole world inside the ornate picture frame.

Here is another masterpiece of playful perspective where a microscale castle is reframed as a stone sculpture. It’s a beautiful idea, perfectly executed, with incredible detail in the stonework.

Brian plays with a mix of scales again with this cozy cottage emerging from a book on a table. The level of detail in the tiny cottage is commendable on its own, but the detail on the table rewards a closer look too!

Going back further, we present Brian’s very first microscale creation, and what a wondrous build it is. The castle alone is a stunner, but the drama of the meteor hurtling towards impact makes it terrifying and transcendent. My favorite touch is the water spilling out of the circular base, another playful example of the blurring of subject and frame.

Even Brian’s more straight-forward builds use perspective and composition in compelling ways. Take for example this teetering tower where construction continues atop a castle built on a narrow dungeon where orcs patrol. The mix of construction, nature, and sheer verticality turns a fun castle vignette into an immersive surreal scene.

This microscale kingdom showcases Brian’s eye for composition again, with such lovely asymmetry in this enchanting kingdom split by water and united by a fragile bridge.

The post For brianbrickster, making magic in medieval LEGO is a matter of perspective appeared first on The Brothers Brick.

One of the great paradoxes of productivity is that doing more often results in doing less.

This is particularly true for folks with busy ADHD brains.

Hustle-and-grind culture and just “forcing yourself to push through it” on tasks is a quick path to a rapid drop in both output and quality, and eventually leads to burnout.

Four or five good hours of work is often far more impactful than eight.

ADHD brains often have a million ideas bouncing around in them, like a lottery machine. Time spent “being lazy” is like turning the machine off for a bit. It gives the balls time to settle down in new and interesting places, and often leads to novel breakthroughs.

Without that rest, you’re trying to solve problems by grabbing random balls as they fly all around you.

Now, “rest” may literally mean doing nothing, but it could also be active rest. Either way, it can help you fall into a state of flow or hyperfocus.

I’ll leave you with wise words from the great philosopher Kunu…

The less you do, the more you do.

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