Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman: Volume 1

This primetime sendup of soap operas, which debuted on January 6, 1976, not only shot to the top of the rating charts in short order but also became a national phenomenon, spawning three spinoffs in as many years. The brainchild of All in the Family producer Norman Lear, the five-nights-a-week Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (or MH2, as some fans called it) mocked the conventions of afternoon drama with the kind of humor that, in a later era, would be called “snarky.” Louise Lasser, a former Woody Allen leading lady, was ideally cast as Mary, a simple housewife from Fernwood, OH. She may have been simple, but her life was anything but: as the show progressed, viewers learned that her blue-collar husband Tom (Greg Mullavey) was impotent, her daughter Heather (Claudia Lamb) was held hostage by a mass murderer, and her grandfather Ray (Victor Kilian) was the notorious “Fernwood Flasher.” And that was all in the first 25 episodes (collected here on an extra-less three-disc set) of the 130-episode first season! Like the later Soap, MH2 succeeded on two levels, enjoyable as satire and soap opera, with sharp writing and excellent performances. Recommended. (E. Hulse)