Video: 'Mary Tyler Moore S1 - Love is All Around'

(Saturday, September 19, 1970, 9:30 p.m. EDT) — The Mary Tyler Moore Show, an American sitcom television series starring Moore as Mary Richards, an unmarried, independent woman focused on her career as associate producer at the fictional WJM-TV news program in Minneapolis, debuted tonight on CBS.

Created by James L. Brooks Allan Burns, Ed Asner co-starred as Mary’s boss Lou Grant, alongside Valerie Harper as her friend and neighbor Rhoda Morgenstern and Cloris Leachman as her landlady Phyllis Lindstrom. Other co-stars throughout the series’ run included Gavin MacLeod, Ted Knight, Georgia Engel and Betty White.

A central female character who was not married or dependent on a man was a rarity in American television in the early 1970s, leading to numerous publications citing The Mary Tyler Moore Show as groundbreaking television in the era of second-wave feminism.