Lou Grant is an
American television drama series starring
Ed Asner as a newspaper editor. The series won 13 Emmy Awards, including "Outstanding Drama Series". Asner won the
Emmy Award for "Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series" in 1978 and 1980. The series also won two
Golden Globe awards, a
Peabody award, an Eddie award, three awards from the
Directors Guild of America, and two
Humanitas prizes. Ed Asner became the only person to win an Emmy Award for both "Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series" and "Actor in a Comedy Series", the latter for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, for portraying the same character.
Broadcast history
Lou Grant was a
spinoff from
The Mary Tyler Moore Show and premiered on
CBS in September 1977. Unlike
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which was a 30-minute
situation comedy,
Lou Grant was a one-hour drama.
Lou Grant ran from 1977-1982 and consisted of 114 episodes. It is one of four shows in the history of American television to have weekly finishes of first and dead last during its run, the others being
AfterMASH,
Cheers, and fellow
Mary Tyler Moore spinoff
Rhoda.
The theme music for the series was composed by
Patrick Williams.
Premise
Lou Grant worked at the fictitious
Los Angeles Tribune daily newspaper as its city editor, a job he took after the WJM television station fired him. (Though
Mary Tyler Moore Show viewers were introduced to the character as a television news producer, the character noted many times that he'd begun his career as a print journalist.) The rest of the main cast included
Robert Walden and
Linda Kelsey, who played general-assignment reporters Joe Rossi and Billie Newman, respectively (Kelsey joined the show in the fourth episode, replacing
Rebecca Balding, who had portrayed reporter Carla Mardigian during the show's first three episodes);
Mason Adams, who played managing editor Charles Hume, an old friend of Lou's who had convinced him to move from Minneapolis to Los Angeles;
Jack Bannon, who played assistant city editor Art Donovan;
Daryl Anderson, who played photographer Dennis Price, usually referred to as "Animal"; and
Nancy Marchand, who played the widowed, patrician publisher, Margaret Pynchon, a character loosely based on real life newspaper publishers
Dorothy Chandler of the
Los Angeles Times and
Katharine Graham of
The Washington Post. Recurring actors who played editors of various departments included
Gordon Jump and
Emilio Delgado. Asner won two Emmys for his portrayal of Lou; Marchand won Emmy Awards for "Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series" four of the five years the series ran; Walden, Kelsey, and Adams all received multiple nominations for supporting Emmys.
The episode often had Lou assigning Rossi and Billie to cover news stories, with the episode's plots revealing problems of the people covered in the stories as well as frustrations and challenges reporters experienced to get the stories. The series frequently delved into serious societal issues, such as nuclear proliferation, mental illness, prostitution, gay rights, and chemical waste, in addition to demonstrating coverage of breaking news stories, such as fires, earthquakes, and accidents of all kind. The series also took serious examination of ethical questions in journalism, including plagiarism, checkbook journalism, entrapment of sources, staging news photos, and conflicts of interest that journalists encounter in their work. There were also glimpses into the personal lives of the Tribune staff.
Gene Reynolds,
James L. Brooks and
Allan Burns were executive producers, and
Gary David Goldberg was a producer.
Many of the episodes in the first season were based on incidents described by
Gay Talese in his history of his former employer
The New York Times,
The Kingdom and the Power. Talese was unaware of this fact more than a decade after the show was canceled.
Controversy
The cancellation of
Lou Grant in 1982 was the subject of much controversy. Reportedly the series had significant enough ratings in its last season to be renewed (it was in the
ACNielsen top ten throughout its final month on the air), but the network declined to renew it largely because of controversies created by Asner in using both the series and his presidency of the
Screen Actors Guild as political soapboxes. Asner's outspokenness in directly opposing the U.S. government's intervention in
El Salvador created problems for the network with its advertisers. Asner also gave one press conference, not long before the show was cancelled, in which he was asked whether he would support free elections in El Salvador even if those elected were communists. Asner responded that if that was what the voters chose in a free election then he would have to support it.
Bibliography
- Douglass K. Daniel, Lou Grant: The Making of TV's Top Newspaper Drama, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
External links
EmmyAward DramaSeries 1976-2000
GoldenGlobeTVDrama 1969-1989
