Allan Burns, Co-Creator of 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show,' Dies at 85
He was not on the list.
A frequent
writing partner of James L. Brooks, the six-time Emmy winner also was behind
'The Munsters,' 'Lou Grant' and 'My Mother the Car.'
Allan Burns,
the six-time Emmy winner who partnered to create one of the best sitcoms of all
time, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and one of the worst, My Mother the Car, has
died. He was 85.
Burns died
Saturday, his frequent writer partner, James L. Brooks, reported on Twitter.
"His
singular writing career brought him every conceivable recognition." he
wrote. "But, you had to know him to appreciate his full rarity. He was
simply the finest man I have every known. A beauty of a human."
No other
details of his death were immediately available.
Burns, who
got an early career break working for animation legend Jay Ward on Rocky and
his Friends and The Bullwinkle Show, also co-created Rhoda and Lou Grant, two
Mary Tyler Moore spinoffs, as well as The Munsters; wrote for a season on Get
Smart; and invented a famous cereal character, Cap'n Crunch, and his nemesis,
the pirate Jean LaFoote.
He also can
make the claim that he discovered Jim Carrey.
Burns
occasionally worked in the movies, and he was nominated for an adapted
screenplay Oscar for A Little Romance (1979), a whimsical teen adventure that
starred a young Diane Lane and Laurence Olivier.
Burns,
though, made his everlasting mark in television, spending more than two decades
as a writer and producer for MTM Productions. His first job for the fledgling
company, launched by producer Grant Tinker and his wife, Mary Tyler Moore, was
concocting the premise for a CBS comedy that would star Moore, who had sparkled
for five seasons on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
It was
Tinker's idea to pair Burns with Brooks. The two had worked together on Room
222, an ABC comedy-drama set at an inner-city school that Brooks had created,
and Brooks had written spec scripts for My Mother the Car.
"He and
Mary were looking around for somebody to write a pilot and come up with a
concept for her show, which had a 13-episode commitment on CBS, and he chose
us," Burns said in a 2012 interview for the Writers Guild Foundation's The
Writer Speaks web series. "That to me was somewhat amazing; I mean, we had
credits, and they were pretty good, but still …"
Their
original concept had Moore's Mary Richards portraying a divorcee working as a
stringer for a Hollywood columnist. "No one had done a show about someone
being divorced," Burns noted. Tinker and Moore loved the idea — both had
been divorced — but CBS execs had "a corporate heart attack" when
they heard what the writers had in mind.
According to
Burns, a CBS exec told them, "Our research shows us there are four things
American television audiences do not like: New Yorkers, Jews, people with
mustaches and divorce."
He added:
"In the next couple of weeks, we came up with the idea of doing it in a
newsroom — Jim had worked in a newsroom in New York and said, 'I always thought
it was a great place for comedy.'" They also made Mary a jilted woman who
moves to Minneapolis after a broken engagement.
As a single,
independent female in the workplace, the character became an icon for the
feminist movement.
The Mary
Tyler Moore Show ran for seven seasons, from September 1970 until March 1977,
and collected a then-record 29 Emmys. Burns and Brooks won five trophies for
their efforts on the show; the last two were for outstanding comedy series and
for writing (with four others) the admired series finale.
Not admired
but certainly derided, My Mother the Car starred Jerry Van Dyke as an attorney
who buys a 1928 Porter Stanhope off a used-car lot and discovers that the
antique vehicle is the reincarnation of his mom. Created by Burns and Chris
Hayward, the comedy lasted just 30 episodes in 1965-66 before being axed.
"It's
nice to know that some people think The Mary Tyler Moore Show is one of the
better shows of all time and that I also did one show that everyone is sure of
is the worst," he said in a 2004 chat for The Interviews: An Oral History
of Television.
Allan Burns
was born on May 18, 1935, in Baltimore. His father died when he was 9, and
three years later he and his mom moved to Honolulu, where his older brother had
been stationed at Pearl Harbor.
He attended
the private Punahou School (Barack Obama would go there later) and designed a
cartoon that ran a couple times a week in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin newspaper.
Burns
received a partial scholarship to study architecture at the University of
Oregon but left school in 1955 and moved to Los Angeles, where he landed a job
as an NBC page. He asked what he had said in the interview that convinced his
new employer to hire him.
"You
said you were a 42 long, right? Well, that's the only uniform we have available
right now. Somebody just quit," he recalled. "The reason that I am in
show business is because I'm a 42 long, that's the truth."
Burns
submitted jokes to The Tonight Show and to comedians George Gobel and Jonathan
Winters without getting a bite and read scripts as part of a new NBC comedy
writing development program. He got laid off, then lasted about a month as a
writer for the game show Truth or Consequences.
After
spending the next couple of years writing gags and drawing cartoons for
greeting card companies, Burns put together a portfolio of his work and headed
without an appointment to Ward's offices on Sunset Boulevard.
As Burns was
trying to talk his way into a meeting with Ward, the producer happened to walk
by. "He looks at all my stuff, starts chuckling and says, 'When do you
want to start?' " Burns recalled. He began by working on promotional
flyers for Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show, later graduating to
"Fractured Fairy Tales" and other bits for $215 a week.
When Ward
was off on vacation, Burns met with execs from the Quaker Oats Co. and designed
the mascot, an 18th century naval captain, for Cap'n Crunch. They wanted the
cartoonist to know that the new cereal "stays crunchy even in milk."
"Stays
crunchy even in milk? Stays crunchy even in acid," Burns quipped.
He and Chris
Hayward had co-created the Canadian Mountie Dudley Do-Right for Ward's company,
and in 1965 they wrote the pilot for CBS' My Brother the Angel, a sitcom
starring the Tommy and Dick Smothers, before embarking on My Mother the Car.
"It
sold, somebody bought it, somebody must have thought it was funny, but the
critics sure didn't," he said in his Oral History interview. "I
probably have spent the rest of my life living that show down. We really — I
promise you — meant for it to be a satire, and it came out to be the worst of
all the shows we thought we were satirizing."
The naive
Burns and Hayward had pitched their idea for The Munsters to an unscrupulous
agent, who then fed that idea to writers Norm Liebmann and Ed Haas at
Universal. When they learned the comedy about a family of monsters was in
production at CBS, they petitioned the WGA and received their rightful credit.
Burns and
Hayward then wrote for the 1967-68 CBS sitcom He and She, starring Richard
Benjamin and Paula Prentiss, and Burns won his first career Emmy (shared with
Hayward) for that. When it was canceled after a season, He and She creator
Leonard Stern brought them aboard another show he was producing, Get Smart.
It was the
spy spoof's fourth season, the one in which Agents 86 (Don Adams) and 99
(Barbara Feldon) got married. "I don't recall that being a particularly
good idea," he said. Burns was reminded of that after Rhoda Morgenstern's
wedding in 1974, when ratings on the Valerie Harper sitcom plunged.)
He and
Hayward split after about four years together when Burns wanted to work on a
movie screenplay and Hayward didn't. (The film wound up not getting made.)
Burns and
Brooks (along with Gene Reynolds) also created the thought-provoking MTM-CBS
hourlong drama Lou Grant, which marked an unprecedented change of genres for a
spinoff. The show got off to a slow start, perhaps because viewers were
expecting to see the sitcom version of Ed Asner's Mary Tyler Moore character.
"The
guy at CBS at the time said to us, 'Fellas, what you appear to be doing is The
New York Times. People don't read The New York Times, they read the Daily
News," Burns recalled. "I remember Grant just exploding, 'You don't
want The New York Times on your network?!'"
Grant told
the network execs, "'Well, guys, hang in there, the show is good, it's
going to make it.' And he said to us, 'Keep doing what you're doing.'"
Burns saw
Carrey performing stand-up at a comedy club in West Hollywood and hired him to
star as a cartoonist in a 1984 sitcom he had created, The Duck Factory. Burns
based the show on his experiences working for Ward.
Other shows
he created for MTM included Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers; Eisenhower &
Lutz, starring Scott Bakula; and FM, set at a public radio station. He received
16 Emmy nominations in all, and he and Brooks were honored in 1988 with the
WGA's prestigious Laurel Award.
For the big
screen, Burns also wrote Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979) and the
Kristy McNichol romantic comedy Just the Way You Are (1984) and wrote and
directed Just Between Friends (1986), starring his old friend Moore.
