That '70s show.(Mary Tyler Moore's show released on DVD)

People still drive around Minneapolis looking for Mary Tyler Moore's house. A few tourists recognize the building in which she worked, the former home of an S&L that hit the skids in the crash. Locals have learned to walk around the statue of Mary tossing her hat.

Ms. Moore will always belong to Minneapolis, but does her show belong to the Ages? It's being released on DVD, so we have a chance to judge this classic anew. The first season didn't sell too well, perhaps because most people remember how unexceptional the inaugural installments were. But July brings the release of the second season (1971-72), when the show began to find its legs, so a new generation of Americans may yet become enmeshed in the famous newsroom.

The more you look at these early '70s characters, though, the more they appear to be an insufferable bunch of narcissists. Start with Mary--a workaholic control freak. That may be why she couldn't hold on to any man for more than an episode. Was she just too tightly wound to accept anyone who might mar the perfect construct of her anal-retentive life? "You're sweet, Bill, really you are, but you don't iron your pajamas before you go to bed, and I'd stay up all night thinking about the crease that isn't there."

Murray the writer was a jerk at the start and a jerk at the end. The more you watch the show the more his constant insults seem less a function of wit and brio than the calculated malice of a guy who'd cross the street to point out a long gray hair in your nose. His neurotic whining and utter lack of self-confidence was glaringly un-Midwestern. And you knew the reason he was bald: His hair was burned off by the torch he carried for Mary.

Lou Grant was one of the great sitcom characters of the 1970s, the last of the gruff-but-lovable Greatest Generation types. He's a brute in the early seasons, a glowering caricature of an old-guard boss. "You got spunk," he said in the first show, in a scene that defined his entire character. "I hate spunk." But of course he didn't really, not when the spunk-possessor was Mary.

Lou, unfortunately, was ...