Five decades ago, on primetime television, “Rhoda’s Wedding” captivated the nation.
It was a milestone event that became a comically costly mistake. So much so that nearly 20 years after it happened, an episode of Murphy Brown served it up as a meta punchline for a scene in which the unmarried TV-journalist tells news-show colleague Jim Dial of her unexpected pregnancy and plans to raise the baby alone.
“Oh, good Lord!” says the often histrionic Dial. “This could be the worst decision anyone’s made in television since Rhoda’s wedding.”
Of course, to be fair, it was more Rhoda Morgenstern’s marriage in 1974 than her wedding that made for that worst decision. Having TV’s most celebrated single hitched, on what was just the eighth episode of her new sitcom, ended up dooming Rhoda only as it had begun. But the wedding itself? The ceremony? That was a massive television success. Am era-defining cultural happening. The whole country attended.
Fifty years ago: Oct. 28, 1974.
Four years of build-up had helped. That’s how long fans of the Rhoda Morgenstern character had waited for something (anything) wonderful to happen for her since meeting her as the overweight and underwed upstairs neighbor to Mary Richards on the first episode of CBS’s Mary Tyler Moore. With her New York-bred self-deprecation, and as played by Valerie Harper, Rhoda became then-new-to-Minneapolis Mary’s best friend. And soon a movement’s, too, as female viewers found solidarity and company in her struggles. She stole each scene she was in over the next four seasons, and Harper won three Emmys in the process. A spin-off series was inevitable. And amid fanfare, Rhoda came to pass in September 1974.
Viewers simply liked the overweight underdog unattached-but-looking-and-never-finding Rhoda Morgenstern more than a slimmed-down happily married oft-acquiescent Mrs. Gerard.
The new comedy found the New York native back home for a visit that became permanent, thanks to Joe Gerard (David Groh), whom Rhoda met and opted to stay for in the premiere, moved in with on the sixth episode, and married two TV-weeks later. If the rapidly escalated romance introduced a sense of Now what? to the show, the something wonderful that was finally happening for Rhoda muffled the question. And the equity enjoyed by both character and star carried Rhoda through its freshman season. Ratings were higher than those of parent-show Mary Tyler Moore. And Harper scored a fourth Emmy, this time as Best Lead Actress.
The Now what? was still there unanswered, though, as the second year got underway, showing both Rhoda and Rhoda slightly toothless now in marriage. A once feisty character was even teetering on the edge of being a settled bore.
The show’s comedy started to lean more toward its supporting players, each with more errant story-threads to pull. Ratings and interest dipped. A star vehicle seemed adrift. So quicker than anyone could say “What wedding?” year three opened with Joe and Rhoda separating, the once-trumpeted marriage taking a back seat. (Groh was seen in just nine of its 24 episodes.)
A year later, an off-screen divorce followed, and forever-single Rhoda was single once again. But at this point, Rhoda was running on fumes of goodwill. It limped along to an intentionally abbreviated fifth season, ending with a whimper in December of 1978, in 95th place out of 114 series for the 1978-’79 season. It was a calamitous fall from the big bang that was Rhoda’s arrival just four years earlier at number one—a first for a series debut.
What happened? Viewers, it seemed, simply liked the overweight underdog unattached-but-looking-and-never-finding Rhoda Morgenstern more than a slimmed-down happily married oft-acquiescent Mrs. Gerard. The sometimes-home-on-Saturday-night Rhoda they’d taken to heart as Mary Richards’ neighbor, the yin to her feminist yang. The frantic Rhoda who implored Mary’s help before a date (“I gotta lose 10 pounds by 8:30”). The unworthy Rhoda too ashamed to reveal she’d won an employee beauty contest at the department store where she worked.
That Rhoda was the one they showed up for when she returned to New York—more polished and secure at 32 than when she’d left in her twenties. The one they cheered when even to her own surprise she dared to ask out handsome stranger Joe just minutes after meeting him (“Oh I thank you, Ms. magazine. I never could have done it without you.”). The one they championed as the relationship deepened as no other had for her. The one they applauded when she was the one who suggested marriage, doing so in her comically self-punishing way, afraid she was betraying a cause or herself (“Joe, I can’t tell you how ashamed of myself I feel. I mean, I thought I was so hip, so with it. Beyond that, y’know? Nineteen Seventies. I do want my name on [your] mailbox, but I want the same name as yours. What a depressing thing to find out about yourself.”)
The one for whom something wonderful was finally happening.
And the wedding was becoming a happening, fueled by a viewership that kept growing as it approached and a countdown publicity blitz capped by a TIME cover with Moore and Harper. Viewing parties were arranged for the night of Oct. 28. Plans were cancelled or rescheduled around it. TV audiences “felt as if a family member were getting married,” wrote Jeryl Brunner in a 2014 Parade retrospective. “An endless stream of wedding gifts from engraved plates to toasters (along with thousands of ‘Congratulations Rhoda and Joe’ cards) poured into CBS studios.”
A national conversation had erupted, equal parts referenda on the long-single-and-independent character’s passionate fanbase and on the second-wave feminism that brought her to this point. By the day of the wedding, it had become “the Avengers of ’70s sitcoms,” wrote Brett White in 2017.
Rhoda Morgenstern, superhero.
The hour-long episode itself was as funny as it was poignant. It drew on the bride-to-be’s sad-sack dating history, and it folded in the familiar TV-wedding tropes—the monomaniacal mother-of-the-bride, the lump-throated fatherly blessing, the almost-didn’t-happen complication (in gown and veil, an accidentally stranded Rhoda was forced to get to the ceremony by subway), the self-written vows (“Joe, uh, you know, don’tcha?”).
As it played out, even the TV competition weighed in. “Let’s go over to Rhoda’s wedding quick,” joked Monday Night Football sportscaster Howard Cosell during ABC’s Falcons-Steelers game. “The chicken liver is getting rancid.”
A confluence of the television-world and real-world, “Rhoda’s Wedding” was watched by 52 million people, a TV record. It was the highest-rated sitcom episode since the birth of Little Ricky on I Love Lucy in 1953 and the highest-rated episode of any TV program in the 1970s until Roots in 1977. Viewers stuck around for the new-marriage storylines (the disastrous honeymoon, the apartment search, the discussion of children). But when the freshman-year frenzy simmered, that back-burnered Now what? heated up. Great for ratings, the marriage ended up hobbling Rhoda—a likely long and lucrative TV run reduced by about half.
But the happening that was “Rhoda’s Wedding” 50 years ago? Like few TV series before or since, it demonstrated the power of television itself married to zeitgeist. And it advanced a primetime movement in the 1970s—playing out within the greater movement—that led to increased representation of women and gender issues, as seen on All in the Family with Gloria Stivic (1971), on Maude with Maude Findlay (1972), on the PBS documentary An American Family with matriarch Pat Loud (1973), and on the Ms.-driven Free to Be … You and Me Marlo Thomas special celebrating individuality (1974). Rhoda was on the front lines of seismic change for TV women.
For all his histrionics, even Jim Dial would have to concede that.
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