All I remember of the spinoff (a few episodes were shown on Tvland years ago)...was that it focused a lot on Mary's husband coping with life after Mary...while Shelley Fabares played the sweet in the outside/sinister on the inside female lead that was scheming to be with Tom while making her sweet sister suffer.

I’m current in the 160s, and the show has indeed picked back up. It really works best as a community ensemble involved in an array of bizarre stories, with Mary as the character floating in and out of all of them.

 

Louise Lasser is interviewed around 50 minutes in. This is from 1971, pre-MHMH.

 

The date on this is wrong.

Some Forever Fernwood audio recordings.

https://archive.org/details/forever-fernwood-392-1978-01-03

https://deadline.com/2026/01/nessa-hyams-dead-exorcist-blazing-saddles-1236694861/

I just got to Garth’s death, and it was actually creepier than I imagined it would be. For some reason, my understanding was that he simply opened the closet and the tree fell on him, and he’s impaled on one of the branches…which never made sense. How it actually happened makes sense, and with Pat’s monologue while he’s trapped in the closet…it’s just a great scene and week-ending cliffhanger. I didn’t expect Pat to become such a big part of the show, but Susan Browning is fantastic. The whole story has walked the extraordinarily thin line between playing it for laughs and playing it straight so well.

Edited 16 hours ago16 hr by All My Shadows

55 minutes ago, All My Shadows said:

I just got to Garth’s death, and it was actually creepier than I imagined it would be. For some reason, my understanding was that he simply opened the closet and the tree fell on him, and he’s impaled on one of the branches…which never made sense. How it actually happened makes sense, and with Pat’s monologue while he’s trapped in the closet…it’s just a great scene and week-ending cliffhanger. I didn’t expect Pat to become such a big part of the show, but Susan Browning is fantastic. The whole story has walked the extraordinarily thin line between playing it for laughs and playing it straight so well.

There are moments, I think, when MH2, like "Soap," transcends parody and becomes legitimately good melodrama.

41 minutes ago, Khan said:

There are moments, I think, when MH2, like "Soap," transcends parody and becomes legitimately good melodrama.

Sometimes it's the mundane that happens to anyone else in real life and forgotten beyond gossip, then it happens to a main character's family. Mary's father exposing himself comes to mind.

4 hours ago, Khan said:

There are moments, I think, when MH2, like "Soap," transcends parody and becomes legitimately good melodrama.

There are several tremendous scenes with Tom and Mary in their bedroom as their marriage slowly disintegrates. Zero comedy involved. They are as good or better than many I've seen on soaps. The closest comparison is the lengthy conversations Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer would put together in the first 3-4 years of Ryan's Hope.

There are also a few tender moments with Ed and Howard that I appreciated, even as most of the story was unsurprisingly about the reactions of the straight characters. I especially appreciated that they spoke about getting married and their last scene on the show was them agreeing to marry.

Initially, the parody aspect of the show shines, and I think their skewering of the media continues that way for a while (from Loretta's Dinah Shore fiasco to the skewing and pseudo-intellectual questions the David Susskind panel throw at Mary - her outburst about what makes her an American is so fitting for today), but otherwise, the comedic/parodic aspects of the show start to get worse. So many of Cathy's stories...and so many of the Loretta and Charlie stories, which I struggle with in spite of thinking highly of the actors (and of Dabney Coleman, who is incredibly magnetic from the first time he appears).

Edited 10 hours ago10 hr by DRW50