'Maude' ahead of our time

ATLANTA -- Conventional wisdom about television doesn't have much of a shelf life. After all, it was less than a year ago that Howie Mandel's TV career was considered dead and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" was definitely going to save whichever network got to air it.

But one thing has always seemed beyond dispute: The Emmy-winning sitcom "Maude" would never even make it onto broadcast TV now. Its bold story lines about race, abortion, feminism and drugs would have the typical 2007 network executive balled up in a corner, cradling old "Touched by an Angel" tapes and trying to ignore the fallout from all sides of the political and moral spectrum.

For a while, it seemed that "Maude" wouldn't even make it onto DVD. Season one finally comes out Tuesday, nearly 35 years after it debuted on CBS in 1972 and became a Top 10 show -- a position it would maintain for the first four of its six seasons.

Watching these initial 22 episodes, it's harder than ever to imagine "Maude" being deemed presentable by today's network TV standards. More's the pity, because from its title character's pithy catchphrase -- "God'll get you for that" -- to its refreshingly grown-up sense of humor, this "All in the Family" spinoff was sit-up-and-take-notice stuff. Its agent provocateur point of view was as foolish to try to ignore as was the 5-foot-10, deep-voiced Maude Findlay (Beatrice Arthur), who blew into rooms and grabbed things by the throat like few female characters before or since.

Only two years earlier, concerns about whether viewers would accept a divorcee as its lead character had prompted the "Mary Tyler Moore" show's creators to make Mary Richards the victim of a broken engagement instead. Yet Maude was a three-time divorcee sharing her suburban Tuckahoe, N.Y., home with her fourth husband, Walter (Bill Macy); her divorced daughter Carol (Adrienne Barbeau); and her grandson.

Meanwhile, one can only imagine a young Dan Quayle's reaction to the two-part episode in which Maude, 47, unexpectedly became pregnant -- a full two decades before Murphy Brown.

Maude had an abortion. And as the aptly titled "Maude's Dilemma" made clear, it was nobody's business but hers and her loved ones'. "For you, for me, in the privacy of our own lives, we're doing the right thing," Walter reassures her during a quiet conversation at home.

Hitting issues head on

"Maude: The Complete First Season" comes complete with dated references: jokes with Morey Amsterdam as their punch line and references to the New York-based "Tonight Show"; neighbor Arthur Harmon (Conrad Bain) sporting an endless supply of groovy leisure suits; and pregnant Maude blithely downing cocktails in the days before anyone had heard of fetal alcohol syndrome.

Yet these episodes feel fresher and funnier than today's sitcoms, thanks to a willingness to talk about real-world issues that went far beyond dealing with a wacky co-worker, hitting on a hottie neighbor or other current made-for-TV preoccupations.

"Grass Story," in which Maude's crowd clumsily attempts to purchase marijuana to protest a local youth's possession arrest, anticipates today's mandatory sentencing debate and smartly satirizes society's unthinking reliance on such licit substances as tranquilizers, liquor and Ritalin. Then there's "Flashback," set mostly in 1968, but filled with enough references to socialized medicine, voter apathy and an increasingly unpopular war to feel up to the minute in 2007.

"I was only for the war if we were going to win," Arthur Harmon, a GOP supporter, tells Democrat Maude before assuring her that Richard Nixon has a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. "Would Mr. Nixon let the whole world know about a plan if he wasn't sure it was going to work?"

Don't hold your breath waiting to hear anything similar on "Two and a Half Men," the only sitcom currently in the Top 10.

In every way, "Maude" is too grown-up to be a network sitcom these days. The actors all look age-appropriate for their characters (indeed, frequent guest star Rue McClanahan, who joined the cast full time in Season 2, looks older than she did 12 years later on "The Golden Girls"). That couldn't happen now, when everyone's literally and figuratively trying to clone "Friends." Maude's 8-year-old grandson appears in a grand total of one scene in the first dozen episodes of this family sitcom that dared to go where "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "According to Jim" wouldn't in later years: full time into a world dominated by adults and everything that interested, amused or concerned them.