"Rhoda" was a spin off of the highly popular "The Mary Tyler Moore Show". After 4 years as Mary Richard's wise cracking neighbour,Valerie Harper took her Rhoda Morgenstern back to New York,for a holiday visiting younger overweight sister Brenda(Julie Kavner)and her parents Martin(Harould Gould)and Ida (Nancy Walker) and decided to stay after meeting Joe(David Groh) The first two seasons crackled as Rhoda got engaged,then married to Joe,resulting in the highly rated wedding episode(with a lot of guest appearances from TMTMS cast)when Phyllis(Chloris Leachman)forgets to pick up Rhoda and she takes the subway,to her wedding! Valerie excelled in her quick one liners and Brenda took on Harper's old role on TMTMS as the overweight,insecure unlucky in love "single gel" but like Rhoda over the seasons Brenda lost the weight too. The unseen but heard doorman on the intercom,Calton(voiced by writer and co-creator of "Rhoda",Lorenzo Music)was always amusing as he was constantly drunk and on a different planet,you began to realise why he was so odd when we met his mother in season2,a great guest star turn by Ruth Gordon. Having decided a married Rhoda was getting maybe too dull,the writers made the bold move of splitting Joe and Rhoda up(for good as it turned out)and it was unusual for a sitcom then,to show the pain of the separation,all credit to Valerie Harper for a heartfelt performance. So in season 3,Rhoda went back on the singles scene and met Sally(Anna Meara) a character created to fill the void left by Nancy Walker who left to try her own series but Miss Walker returned in seasons 4 and 5. At the start of season 4,Rhoda was divorced but then she took a job in a custom hire place,causing the Rhoda character to loss a lot of her independence and giving Rhoda a "Lou Grant" style boss,this seemed wrong to me. Valerie Harper,Julie Kavner and Nancy Walker were still giving great comedic performances but the scripts didn't seem to match the earlier seasons,one highlight was "Blind Date" when Rhoda felt guilty about not wanting to see a blind date again as he was bald,small and unattractive(David Landsberg)only for him to verbally attack her on their second date saying she was "old" and her face "looked like a fist". So sadly the series fizzled out rather than going out on a high like TMTMS and the recent "Mary and Rhoda" film,I found a disappointment,I do hope this classic 70s show comes out on DVD very soon!
Review of Rhoda
