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The result, lurching haphazardly between melodrama and MTM-lite comedy, is not just inferior but unsettlingly wrong, like a beloved relative reanimated as a zombie. Moore and Harper click instantly--Rhoda might well have been cryogenically preserved since 1978, and shows charming touches of her mother Ida when hectoring her own daughter--but they're burdened with sentimentality and limp one-liners. The Mary we see here shows glimpses of her self-effacing but strong self, yet at other times, incongruously, seems to have become a helpless uptown lady-who-lunches and slips into self-help-speak like "I'd had it with having it all." And the career subplot turns into a journalism lesson that makes Lou Grant look subtle.
It's too bad, because, as that plot notes--updating MTM's practical feminism--it's rare for two sharp older women to show their stuff on TV, and Moore, 63, proves when she has the chance here that she's still one of the most brilliant and sadly underutilized comedic actresses around. It'd be great to have her back in prime time--please God, in a different show--and should that happen, we'd all wish her to break a leg. Just go easy on that capitatum.
--Reported by William Tynan/New York