The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Image via Wikipedia
It must have been somewhere around the time I was in third grade — when the Disney Channel was something you had to pay for and my parents got it for us for a year — that I fell in love with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. With our Disney Channel subscription, I feel like we also got better cable and therefore access to channels like Nickelodeon, which turned into TV Land at night (the details are fuzzy and could be a story of revisionist history). Regardless of whether it was at night on Disney or at night on TV Land, I remember lying on the couch in our basement family room, waiting for The Mary Tyler Moore Show to come on.
There was something I just loved about it, and looking back, I think it was Mary Richards’ independent nature. My third grade teacher (also favorite teacher and the one who most inspired me to become an educator) was the first I’d had who wasn’t married. She lived in an apartment a few blocks away from my house, and something about Mary Richards reminded me of her. I imagined that her apartment looked just like the one where Mary lived: the 60s-style living room that was a few steps lower than the rest of the apartment surrounding it, a tiny kitchen where she made dinner for herself and a friend who, in my mind, looked exactly like Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper’s free-spirited character).
Over the years, I watched this show any time I saw that it was on. When I got a Hulu subscription a few months ago, I sat and watched seasons at a time. And that’s when it hit me.
Frankasaurus. 
