As a lifelong Mary fan, I was excited to see "Being Mary Tyler Moore" in San Francisco last weekend. I'd give it a solid B+. The upside - lots of good material, laid out logically. A downside - a lot of it was poor video quality which I wish they could have "cleaned up" more. Unlike the previous reviewer, I LOVED the last half-hour of the film, as it provided clips of Mary and photos from her life that I hadn't seen before. If all you care about are her two most well-known TV series, you can just watch them on YouTube. What this film provided was more of a behind-the-scenes look at the real woman, who I became a fan of through watching her many interview appearances over the years. So in contrast to the previous reviewer, I sat through the first hour and a half to get to the good stuff at the end.

There were pros and cons to the use of only voice-overs for the interviewees. I liked that the video of Mary was not cut away from. The interview subjects who were close friends of Mary's may not be people that are widely recognized - I'm not sure how many people would be thrilled to watch Bill Persky or Beverly Sanders. But I will say that at times I felt like the video and audio competed - if I focused on the visual, I missed some of what the people were saying.

I felt that the theme could have been a little better laid-out. They were going for "not hiding the blue-eyed horse" - a lovely reference from Mary's autobiography that referred to letting people see your "flaws" since they make you who you are, and can be part of the beauty of your story.

I think an alternative theme that would have worked would be "the accidental role model", as time and again, Mary would be "looked to" as an example. One instance is when her trip to the Betty Ford clinic was revealed in the press, and she had to "go with it" and become a role model for recovering alcoholics.

I would have preferred more emphasis to be placed on her later life, since that is what people are less familiar with. She was an important advocate for animals, which was barely mentioned (but there were some awesome clips of her with her horses and dogs). They mentioned her work with JDRF, but to me, more details there would have been welcome. I would also love to hear more about her home life and how her family perceived her. How about a sequel - or a book?

Using a wealth of archive material, this documentary covers both the well-known and obscure work of Mary Tyler Moore. She was successful from day one, getting the first television job she auditioned for the day after her high school prom and then starring in two of the most loved comedies in television history.

Meanwhile, her personal life was almost unbelievable suffering and tragedy, especially in contrast to her fictional personas in the living rooms of America.

This documentary benefits from being produced by Moore's surviving husband, allowing access to home movies, personal photographs, and all the episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore Show that Moore's company (MTM) produced.

The film also suffers from being produced by Moore's husband. Her first two marriages are barely examined, but her third (to the film's producer) gets a lot of screen time late in the movie when the viewer is ready for the credits to roll.

An objective eye would have seen that this movie is about 30 minutes too long. There is an endless interview with Rona Barrett that is sampled too many times. One clip from a surreal and forgotten television special in which Moore is shown dreaming and floating in space would have been enough, but it is used over and over and over. A home movie of a wedding shower is interminable, far too much time is spent showing us Moore on the ranch she retired to, and contemporary celebrities who did not work with Moore gush about how important she was to their development.

No one seemed to realize that the "third act" of her life is the least interesting to general audiences, even if it is the most important to the producer. The end result is too much of a good thing. There is something to be said for, "Leave them wanting more."

Greetings again from the darkness. It's borderline unfathomable that someone who has worked for almost 20 years as a cinematographer and a decade as a TV director could be "unfamiliar" with the work and career of one of the industry giants, yet that's the claim of director James Adolphus ("Soul of a Nation" mini-series) when it comes to Mary Tyler Moore. His film does play a bit as if he's opening a Christmas present that everyone else in the room knows what's under the wrapping, and it's because of this, the film works as not just a retrospective of her career, but also a tribute to a woman who influenced so many.

"The Dick Van Dyke Show" ran for 158 episodes between 1961 and 1966, and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" ran for 168 episodes between 1970 and 1977. These were two immensely popular shows during their respective eras, and because of her characters in each, Mary Tyler Moore spent time as both America's favorite wife and America's favorite single woman. These characters were cutting edge (for different reasons) for their time. Director Adolphus also provides insight into her childhood and early career. Mary was first married in 1954, not long after high school graduation. She found work as 'Happy Hotpoint', the dancer on Hotpoint advertisements, and clips of the ads are included here. Even after she became a world-famous actor, she remained a dancer at heart.

Betty Friedan and "The Feminine Mystique" are referenced a few times, and the point is made, even if it's in a subtle manner, that Mary's impact on feminism has long been overlooked. We hear from such industry folks as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Asner, James L Brooks, and Treva Silverman, as well as friends and family, but it's really Mary herself that we see on screen for the vast majority of the two-hour run time. In particular, a loose structure is formed from clips of her appearances on "The David Susskind Show" and an interview with Rona Barrett. These segments allow for some rare personal insight into Mary Tyler Moore as a person.

So many rare pictures, clips, and home movies are included that we easily follow a career that spanned 50 years ... and three marriages. The first marriage produced her only child. The second marriage, to Grant Tinker, resulted in MTM Productions and her greatest professional success. However, it was the third marriage to Dr. Robert Levine, where she found true and long-lasting love, as well as the motivation to find herself with a stint at the Betty Ford Clinic for rehab in 1984. We learn of her Broadway redemption with "Whose Life is it, anyway?", after her setback on stage many years earlier with a musical "Breakfast at Tiffany's". Probably the most surprising segment here revolves around the original pilot for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" ... it has great video and behind-the- scenes scoop.

Given her comedic chops displayed in her two most famous sitcoms, many of us were caught off guard with her Oscar nominated performance in Robert Redford's ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980). What we discover here is that Mary's personal life was nearly as rosy as Laura Petrie's or Mary Richards', and many real-life personal losses allowed her to reveal a bit more of her true self on screen. Most of us know that Mary was the female lead in Elvis Presley's final feature film, CHANGE OF HABIT (1969),but we might not have known that Carl Reiner was her comedy hero, or that her own struggles with diabetes (over decades) led her to become International Chairperson of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). For one who seemed to constantly define the contemporary woman, Mary Tyler Moore's story is impressive, and her personal archives bring more meaning to "Love is All Around."

Beginning May 26, 2023, the documentary will air on HBO and stream on MAX.