OPERATION: LOU from the Saturday evening CBS classic sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show, set in Minneapolis, was first broadcast in December, 1972 during the series' third season...I was there at home, age 16, in front of our black and white TV watching it all unfold. This episode, in which WJM-TV news department producer Lou Grant goes to the hospital to get shrapnel removed that he received in his posterior during World War II combat, reverses the typical relationships among Grant (played by Ed Asner), newscaster Ted Baxter (Ted Knight), associate producer Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore) and writer Murray Slaughter (Gavin MacLeod). While Grant is in the hospital, Ted displays genuine caring and companionship visiting his usually antagonistic boss while back in the newsroom Mary and Murray, usually very affable with one another, get very testy and stressed out over their differences while they try to fill in for Lou. If this were all that this episode had to offer, then I probably wouldn't have included it in this weekly blog feature of greats from the past. But during the very last scene, when Lou is back at work in his office and Ted up before the camera delivering the live news show, something so funny happens that I lost it, laughing uncontrollably for several minutes...and then starting up laughing again whenever I would think of it. Still now, 48 years later, to me it is one of the greatest comedy moments I have ever experienced...guess you'll have to watch it yourself to find out! I'd say skip most of the episode and just watch the ending, but that wouldn't work: everything has to build up to that magic moment...
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