There are few things harder than updating a legend. Imagine if someone decided to paint a sequel to the Mona Lisa; carve a sequel to Michelangelo's David; compose a sequel to Handel's Messiah.
Or film a sequel to "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."That's the task that Moore and her former co-star, Valerie Harper, undertook with the ABC movie "Mary and Rhoda" (Monday, 7 p.m., Ch. 4), which picks up the lives of Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern more than two decades after they signed off their sitcoms. A television task of Herculean proportions, but one that Moore refused to be daunted by.
"She said to me, 'Val, we can't let (the fact) that there was a fabulous show before stop us from doing this,' " Harper said. "And she said, 'I will kick myself if I don't do it because of our fear of how it will turn out. Maybe we'll fall on our faces, but let's take a chance.' And I agree with her."
And, despite the fact that comparisons are inevitable, they'd just as soon avoid them.
"Particularly Mary, but all of us were vigilant about keeping up the quality but yet never being the old show," said executive producer Susan B. Landau. "It doesn't look like a sitcom. It's not a sitcom. It's a movie. It was designed that way."
But Moore's original idea was not to do a one-shot TV movie, but to bring back Mary and Rhoda in a new weekly sitcom.
"I was trying to sell it as a series," Moore said, "but Katie Ford, our wonderful writer on this project, pointed out that even she could not have done it in a half-hour forum. You can't do that much background, back-story of where these two women have been and what their daughters are and what their goals are and what the challenges are in a 24-minute project. So once I found that it was probably not going to happen as a series, I thought maybe we could sell it as a movie -- and so we did."
Ah, the daughters. Yes, both Mary and Rhoda have become mothers since we last saw them in the late '70s.
It turns out that, after being fired from her job at WJM in the final episode of "Mary Tyler Moore," Mary Richards went back to school and got a degree in journalism. She worked as a producer at (surprise!) ABC News and married a man who eventually was elected to Congress. The two became the parents of a daughter, (Joie Lenz), who is now a college freshman.
Rhoda also got married for a second time -- unwisely, as it turned out -- to a Frenchman. And Mary's warnings against the marriage caused a falling out between the two friends.
As the movie begins, both women are newly single. Mary's husband has recently passed away and Rhoda has finally left hers -- so they end up moving in together in New York City and trying to rebuild their lives. Both of them have to find jobs: Rhoda goes to work as a photographer's assistant; Mary takes a job producing news segments on a less-than-reputable TV news operation.
Moore's other original idea didn't work out as well -- she wanted Rhoda to have a daughter named Mary and Mary to have a daughter named Rhoda.
"It turned out that, practically, it made no sense to have two Marys and two Rhodas," she said. "How would you know who was talking about what? We did come close, though."
Mary's daughter is named Rose; Rhoda's daughter (Marisa Ryan) is named Meredith.
"Mary and Rhoda" doesn't shy away from the characters' age, it revels in their 60ish-ness. (Although the characters played by the actresses -- Moore is 63; Harper is 59 -- are somewhat younger than the actresses themselves.) And the movie makes a point of bucking the Hollywood stereotype that "the minute menopause hits, women are no longer interesting."
"We took that on as our challenge to show that it does, in fact, not make sense," Moore said. "And, yeah, you'll find that, in moviemaking, that the tendency is to stay with the young and sexy and bouncy and cute and adorable, and that's good. But I'd like to see some other options. I'd like to see some character interaction and dealing with subjects that are also important in life."
"Aging is so inevitable, and we should start embracing it," Harper said. "I just hope through Mary's leadership on this, it will change. I don't know a lot of movies where people say they're 60 several times or late 50s on camera."
And the actresses both said they're enjoying life more than ever these days.
"I'm just terrifically wonderful," Moore said. "Better than I ever have been.
"I don't think (my) core values have changed. Maybe a little rounding of the edges as one gets older and develops a patina," she said. "A little more awareness of the reality of lives as opposed to the hoped-for happy endings, and you see that in those characters."
Harper said that she feels a lot like her character. "I think both of the characters (are filled) with wisdom and just settling in and relaxing a little into who you are as you get older," she said.
At this point, Moore said "Mary and Rhoda" absolutely, positively won't end up being a series.
"I really enjoyed doing the movie, but I think I would rather go on to other things," she said.
One of which is writing a book about making the "Mary and Rhoda" movie.
"I'm writing an outline now for a book about the emergence of me, Mary, as a grown-up person who, for the first time in her life, actually took the reins and made something happen," Moore said. "All the time I was the MTM initials of that fabulous production company, I really was never involved. But I have been involved in this. And so I'm going to write this whole story from trying to sell it as a series to having it happen as a movie."
Maybe she could call it, "I Made It After All."