I am writing this article a few weeks after the passing of actor Ed Asner. He was a prolific actor who is most popular for portraying the character Lou Grant, first on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and then on Lou Grant. Younger generations may remember him as the voice of Carl Fredricksen in the movie UP.
This is the first color television show to be written about on Gleestreet.com. The idea of classic TV at least to this writer, is black and white television shows. In the spirit of having even more interesting content on this site and on our Substack page/newsletter, I’ve decided to add shows that began production up to 1979. Lou Grant falls within this timeline. I’m glad, because Lou Grant was always one of my favorite TV shows.
While not a fan of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, where Ed Asner portrayed Lou Grant as a TV news producer, he changes professions and moves to an editorial role at the Los Angeles Tribune in the Lou Grant TV show. Other regular actors on the show included Nancy Marchand (The Sopranos), Robert Walden (Brothers/All The President’s Men),Linda Kelsey, Darryl Anderson, James Bannon, and Mason Adams.
The show followed the lives of reporters and editors in the newsroom of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune. There were 114 episodes filmed over the five seasons the show was in production. Lou Grant was created by James L. Brooks(Room 222, Rhoda, The Simpsons), Alan Burns (Get Smart, Rhoda, The Bullwinkle Show) and Gene Reynolds (M*A*S*H, My Three Sons, Leave it to Beaver). The first two seasons were pretty much apolitical and dealt with the everyday happenings of a newspaper and the stories they would find locally and regionally such as kidnapping, an earthquake and bad judges. The writing was brilliant and humor was injected in just the right spots of each script. The storylines for seasons 3-5 became more political in nature dealing with issues such as illegal immigration, the terrorism of the Irish Republican Army, the death penalty, gun rights and South American dictatorships.
One of the reasons Lou Grant holds a special place in my heart is because of the time span in which it aired. The years 1977-1982 were very formative in my upbringing and I even spent my 13th birthday watching Lou Grant on a lonely Monday night when my Dad took my ex-brother and ex-sister, a former younger step-brother and step-sister he adopted and then unadopted, to a KISS concert. I didn’t like that group then (I do now), so I hung out at a gas station until 8 pm with my Pakistani friend Shaqueel who ran that station and he dropped me off at my apartment so I could catch Lou Grant at 9:00 p.m. My friend Shaqueel, after dropping me off, also headed to downtown Tulsa to watch Gene Simmons spit fire and sing “I Want to Rock n’ roll All Nite.”
That episode of Lou Grant I watched that night was “Hype.” It’s not even one of my favorite episodes. But the next time you watch it (here’s a youtube link), think of me, sitting home alone in an apartment on E. 32nd Street in Tulsa Oklahoma enjoying my favorite TV show that fall season. My favorite because I too wanted to be a writer. And here I am, in all my glory, hopefully entertaining you with this article/blog post on the Lou Grant TV show.
You can watch all the shows on DVD and most can be purchased here on Amazon.
